To Create Predictable Growth, You Need...

This is the Momentum podcast.

If you're an entrepreneur, the word predictable is probably not the way you've been working toward in your business, predictability suppresses our freedom and we worked all our lives to have freedom, freedom from people telling us what to do. Freedom from feeling controlled or constraint of any kind. The issue is that we can often confuse this freedom to choose whatever we want and equating predictability as the restriction of growth potential in our business. Far too many of us fail to do one key thing that will create success in our business. In this episode of the Momentum podcast, Alex is going to be telling you what that one thing is and how to remove that barrier to success of your business.

Speaker 1 [00:00:47] 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. Talking about predictability in your business is not something that a lot of coaches and consultants will talk about, and here's why. When you use the word predictability, here's what a lot of entrepreneurs hear. A lot of entrepreneurs hear boring. A lot of entrepreneurs here. I'm going to have a meeting on my my schedule every week. A lot of entrepreneurs here. You know, predictability is frustrating. I want things to be new and fresh and exciting and predictability. Predictability does not sound like freedom. And when you look at us as entrepreneurs, a lot of the reason that we went into entrepreneurship or are entrepreneurs is to create a level of freedom for ourselves. I always joke with people that entrepreneurship is is that quest for freedom, where you leave the nine to five working for someone else so you can work from nine to nine, seven days a week, 365 days a week or year to work for yourself and call it freedom. But in a lot of ways, that joke is actually very true.

That's what happens to a lot of entrepreneurs and a quest for freedom. They end up doing everything. They end up doing all of it. And one of the reasons is because your business isn't predictable. And in our organization and our coaching models, we talked about we talk about predictable growth. We talked about predictable system. We talk about having a predictable planning process where what is happening in the business is predictable. And here's why. There's really three reasons why this is so incredibly important. So, number one, I'm going to go through these summaries and I'm going to go a little in-depth. No one is as a entrepreneur, your job is to assign the limited amount of resources in your business to get the maximum result. And the more predictable things are, the more predictable the next outcome is, the faster you get there. The second reason why this is so important is when things are predictable in your business, you actually understand what you need. You understand whether you need knowledge or people or systems.

You understand when you're delegating. Are you going to delegate to one of the four things you delegate to? We always delegate it to one of four things we delegate to. It's on my wall process, project person or policy. When we know what's coming next, we can properly delegate what's going on. And then the third reason is when things are predictable, you can get your team out in front of you. I hear things from entrepreneurs all the time, like my team doesn't take initiative.

I'm always asking questions. I feel overwhelmed. Well, a lot of the reason is your team doesn't know where you're going. You haven't made things predictable for them. So let's talk about how we how we improve all three of these situations. So first, when we look at resources, if you look at and this is this statistic bothers people. But I want you to know that it's absolutely true. We've tested it. We talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs every single month, and less than one percent have a clear written strategic plan to everyone on the team understands. Say that one more time, less than one percent of entrepreneurial businesses have a clear written strategic plan that everyone on the team understands. And so what does that mean when you look at your job as an entrepreneur is to take the limited resources you have and assign them in the business in a way that's going to create maximum growth? Well, when you don't know where the business is going, you are literally guessing on a day by day, minute by minute basis as to what you're going to do next.

This can be anxiety provoking and frustrating and exhausting. And the reason I believe most entrepreneurs do this is they don't understand how simple and really how realistic and how predictable the solution is. If you have a system to create a strategic plan in your business and everyone in the business understands that strategic plan and they all understand where they're going and they all understand their role, then you are going to create massive momentum around that strategic plan. And all of the sudden it is that much easier for you to take the resources you have, assign them to the right places to get the maximum result because you've already stated where you're going to go. You've already clarified the destination. You have a clear outcome in the form of your strategic plan. So now you know exactly where to put those resources so that the business will grow.

This changes things for you as an entrepreneur. It cuts down on decision making fatigue. It cuts down on the frustration you have as an entrepreneur. It cuts down on what we've all done, the mistakes we've all made, where we take the limited resources we have and we put them into a project or an outcome. We put them in what we think is going to move the business forward. We're excited about it. We think it's going to work. We pull it off. We make the project happen. And then nothing happens in our business, it is one of the biggest letdowns that you can have as an entrepreneur to burn resources and time and effort and energy and focus and not get a result. When when you create predictability through the creation of a strategic plan that changes, you actually know where you should put those resources for maximum forward progress. Now, the second area, when you're understanding what you need, understanding what you need in the business, I said earlier, you know, you need you'll know whether you need knowledge or people or systems. Here's why.

When you create a forward looking plan, a strategic plan that says, you know, I get up every morning, I go into the future, I create this new reality, I come back to the present and I demand it becomes real. But I create a strategic plan from the present all the way to that reality. So we know all the steps in between. And if me and my team know the steps in between, then I know what I need to do in the business. I know what the business needs. I know whether we need knowledge or people or systems or processes in order to achieve the goal that we've already spelled out. And I can work with my team to say, how do we delegate this? How do we make sure that this happens? How do we create this outcome here? Are we going to use are we going to create a new process in the business that runs over and over again? Are we going to have a project where we get this done so that we create a new outcome in the business? Are we going to have a person in the business who goes and gets this done or do we need a new person? Do we need to change somebody's job description? Do we need to bring somebody new in or are we going to create a policy around making sure this gets done the same way forward over and over again? This is huge in a business. When you understand what you need, you can bring in the right resources. You can you can delegate to the right to the right outcome. You can delegate in the right way so that, again, you create that massive forward momentum in your business. And now here's the big one. The third one. The third one is how having predictability in your business completely changes how you work with your team. This one is so important. It's so crucial because, you know, when I talk to entrepreneurs who have teams, the spectrum of feedback that I get is all over the place. But honestly, the vast majority of it is not positive.

The vast majority of it is entrepreneurs who say things like, well, I hired somebody and it didn't work out, or I have a team right now and I'm really frustrated or I just don't know how to get them to stop bothering me. You know, I hired four people and now I want to go back to doing it all myself. I call that the quitting fantasy. As we scale our business, we hire people. We don't really know where we're going. We don't have a strategic plan. We bring in people to help us with the tactical issues every day and then we get up one morning and it just all feels overwhelming because we've been making it all happen. There's no plan in place for anybody to follow. We are the plan. We are that that system that makes sure everybody's going in the right direction. And that is exhausting as an entrepreneur, that knocks the wind out of you as an entrepreneur. And so when I look at what changes when you have a strategic plan, check out how your relationship with your team changes. When you have a strategic plan, where you've told them where you're going now, your team can get up every day and get out in front of you. See, if you don't have a strategic plan, you will always be the biggest bottleneck in the business.

If you don't have a strategic plan, your team will always have to ask you what they need to do next. If you don't have a strategic plan, you are going to get killed by God in minutes and interruptions. And hey, can you check on this? We call it transactional management. It's what do you tell people what to do? You check it. It got done and you tell them what to do again. You know what you do next? You check That it it got done and you tell them what to do and then you check it. It got done. You tell them what to do. It's exhausting. We hear it in the dialog from entrepreneurs.

They say things like, I just keep having to repeat myself to my team, telling them the same thing over and over again. Well, here's the anecdote for this incredibly uncomfortable situation. As you create a strategic plan that shows you and your team where you're going, you make sure it's a real strategic plan because it's in writing. Everyone understands it. Everyone has a copy and they know their role. They know what they're doing to pull this off. And what happens when you do that is immediately you get better ROIC off of every penny you're paying your team. If I told you that tomorrow, you could increase the return on investment, you're getting your team on your team by 20, 30, 40, 50, as much as one hundred percent, you could double the productivity of your team by making things predictable and showing them where you're going. I want you to know we do this all the time. We show entrepreneurs how to do exactly that. And often they get more than double the productivity, more than double the impact, more than double the revenue, the income from just having a strategic plan. I liken it to an entire sports team being told to go on the field without a play, without knowing who they're playing against, without knowing whether it's offense or defense, without knowing what they're doing next. That's what it's like working in an entrepreneurial business without a strategic plan. Everyone has to ask the coach every time they do anything. What is the next move we make?

Well, if you eliminate that issue, that challenge by putting a strategic plan in place, your team now can get out in front of you and you get a better ally. And here's the big one. You don't just keep a players. You attract a players. You attract people who are going to come into your business and help you explode what you're doing. Help you help more people. Help you make a bigger impact. And they're going to be excited about it because you know what the players want. A players want a target they can knock down. They want a plan to get there and they want to be able to execute like crazy so they can show you how amazing they are. And if you bring in a whole team of players, you have to have a strategic plan or they will come in one side of your company and go right out the other because a players will not stand for losing a players will not give will not give into the pain of not knowing what to do next. A players will not put up with having to ask you a whole bunch of questions for them to be able to perform. They want to be able to go out and show you themselves and the world how amazing they are. And when you give them the destination in the form of strategic of a strategic plan, it changes everything.

So I've only covered today three areas where predictability in your business is going to change everything. The first one is in how you assign resources as a CEO. It's one of the most important things that you do as the person running the business. The second one is in understanding what you need next.

Do you need knowledge, people, systems, or are you going to delegate to a process project person or a policy? And then the last thing that I shared was what this does to your team, the fact that you can go from having a team that is performing at a certain level and then radically increase the return on investment you're getting with that team by just making things predictable, by just giving them the clarity of a strategic plan. It changes everything in your business. So I want to now circle back to what I was talking about at the beginning of this and what I had mentioned as far as why we as entrepreneurs don't love predictability, why we as entrepreneurs sometimes fight predictability. And the reason is that as entrepreneurs. We feel like predictability takes away our freedom, but the reality is, and I just want you to like, really think about this and let this wash over you. The more predictable your business is, the more you know where to assign resources, the more you understand what you need next, the more your team has clarity as to what they're doing, that predictability actually creates freedom.

I'm going to restate that in another way, because as entrepreneurs, we fight predictability because it feels like a lack of freedom. Spontaneity feels like new. We want and we want freedom. We want it to be new and next. But when we create predictability in our business, because we're the person in charge, because we're the person running the business, because we're the person with the vision, when we make things predictable for our team, we buy freedom for ourselves. We create freedom in our business for ourselves. You know, the most dramatic example of this for me came a couple of years ago, not last year, but the year before my mom passed away towards the end of the year. And it was a shock. My family was in Hawaii. We got a phone call that my mom had a stroke. We had to fly back to California. It was incredibly difficult and traumatic and something I spent a lot of time in therapy working through and. When that happened. I didn't want to work, I didn't want to be on Huddle's, I didn't want to do anything, I wanted to go process what had happened with my mom. I was one of those people who had convinced themselves that their parent would never die. I was actually operating under the delusion that nothing would ever happen to my mom. And so when I did it completely reset my entire reality, it knocked me backwards.

And Marilyn, thank you. Somebody just made the comment, so sorry and I appreciate that, but. Here's what I can tell you, that predictability bought for me the day after my mom passed away, I called Haley, who helps us run our company, and I told her I'm taking some time off. And she said, how long? I said, I don't know. It's going to be at least the next six weeks, but it'll probably be longer. And I just don't know. I need to process. I need some space. I don't want to think right now. I don't want to be in Huddle's right now and I want to be in meetings right now. I just need to to, like, reconcile what's happened in my life and. Honestly, losing my mom, I want to, like, reframe and understand who I really am, this is this has been significant for me and. Here's what's interesting, I didn't just take six week weeks off, I think I took more than eight weeks off. And when I say off, I mean with barely a check in. I didn't answer emails. I didn't answer boxers.

I think Haley might have reached out a couple of times via text with really quick things that I handled. But I wasn't on a call. I wasn't in communication. I didn't do anything for that entire time period. I had the confidence that my business was fine because we'd already created a strategic plan and there's a system in my business to renew that strategic plan over and over again so that we continue to create forward momentum. And I knew that I had to have that time to reconcile what had happened in my life. But I also was able to do it with the confidence and with the clarity that I knew my team was going to be able to continue the impact of what we were were doing. They were going to continue to be able to help our members. They were going to be able to continue to to move things forward and to make things happen for us. And that gave me the confidence to really separate and process and understand what had happened and grieve my mother and remember her life and remember all the amazing lessons that I learned from her. And that was one of the greatest gifts I think I've ever had in my entire life, was having that time and that space where I could.

Process in a way that most people I know who've lost a parent did not have the opportunity to process, and that came from the predictability that I built into my business. And I want you to have the exact same thing. And so I think somebody over here in the comments asked earlier about how can I create a strategic plan while I want you to know our team has been hard at work at exactly a strategic planning product. And we are actually on a wait list right now. I'm going to go ahead and drop the link here. If you go to Charfen dot com for its last stand by in just the next couple of weeks, I'm going to be doing a webinar, a presentation on strategic planning is probably going to be about 90 minutes. And I'm going to show you exactly what a strategic plan means and business, what it has done for some of our members. I'm going to give you some of the real reasons you need a strategic plan.

But I'm also going to give you the strategy and tactics you can use walking away from that webinar to put a plan together that is going to radically improve your business. And I'll also give you the opportunity to work with us. So if you're interested in creating a strategic plan, go to Charfen dot com forward, slash, stand by and LEADA and come come to the webinar. I'm sure there will be a replay. And let me show you how we've helped companies implement a planning process, create a strategic plan and completely and totally change the trajectory of their business. And I want to do the same thing for you and I want to help you have that same outcome, because here's what I want you to know about being an entrepreneur in.

If. You're new at this or you haven't run a large organization yet, or you haven't had the opportunity to feel fully and totally supported by a team. Here's what I want you to know. When you have a plan in place and when you have a team that supports you and when you have the freedom of predictability in your business, that is when you are going to have those inspirations and insights that caused those massive forward leaps forward where you take quantum leaps in growth and then you get back to predictability and the business grows again. But when you have that space, this is the paradox. When the business is predictable, that's when you can go out and have the insight and the creativity to go out and change the world. And that predictability is caused by, as is provided by a simple strategic plan that will change the business for you, for your team and for everyone that interacts with you. You will be an infinitely better business than you are today. Once things are more predictable and you have a plan, go to Charfen dot com forward, slash standby. Love to connect with you. I'd love to have you on our webinar. This has been a lot of fun and I look forward to seeing you right around this same time next week.