Avoid the Crisis of Your Own Making

This is the Momentum podcast. I was recently asked an interesting question by a friend of mine who reviewed the billionaire code. And if you have not seen the billionaire code, you haven't seen me present it. You can go to billionaire code dot com and check it out. The billionaire code, just to give you context, is the nine levels that every entrepreneurs, business and the entrepreneur go through in order to create $100 million business. And, you know, I've been on that journey myself. I've gotten into the tens of millions several times. Helped a ton of companies get into the tens of millions and then a handful not harmful. Probably a few handfuls get into the hundreds of millions and even beyond. And the question that I got asked was, what is the most important thing for an entrepreneur to understand as they go through the billionaire code? And it caused me to pause. You know, I thought it was such a well phrased question because it's like, what is the most important thing? And so here's what I came up with. 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. Should 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. You know, in the early stages of the billionaire code, when it's just you, when it's just you getting the business off the ground. By far the most important thing is for us to take care of ourselves. It's for us to maximize ourselves. It's it's the habit, you know, not necessarily the goals, but the habits that keep us on track. You need a routine. If you don't have a routine, you need a routine. It's it's it's interesting. You know, I keep seeing like this this sentiment in the entrepreneurial world of like, I don't have a routine. I don't need a routine. You know, at the end of the day, the people who say they don't have a routine have one, it's just not very good. And it's it's haphazard and it's random. And the the early stages of the behavior in a code, you know, having a routine, taking care of yourself, being able to set personal outcomes and achieve them. And, you know, and those are the most important things in the early stages of business. But the friend of mine that was asking has already run a multimillion dollar company. And he was he was asking more on the higher levels. You know, once you get into that 300000 to 1000000 and then one to 3000003 to 10 million, here's the most important thing or the the thing that as entrepreneurs, we need to understand is that growing a business, once you have a team, is an exercise in letting go. And there's a reason why so many entrepreneurs have a hard time letting go. And let me explain the first part and the second part of that statement. So first, let's let's talk about why is growing a business, an exercise and letting go when you are the only person working in the business, when the business is small, when the business is starting up, you have all of the information because there's nobody else there. You actually have more information in the early days of startup than you will ever have as the company scales. And I've been challenged on this. People say, like, Alex, what do you mean? That sounds uncomfortable. I, you know, I don't want to not have information in my business. Well, that's just a fact that we all have to face as we grow our business, we have to make increasingly difficult decisions with less and less and less and less information, because we can't possibly have all the information we had when the business was just starting up. And so when I say that, the most important thing for us is, is an exercise in letting go. It's an exercise in letting go, of being in charge first. It's an exercise of letting go, of doing everything. And that's in those early stages, 300000 to 1000000. You know, when when we're first starting to delegate one more delegating time, when we're getting our time back by having other people do things for us. It's an exercise in letting go, of doing things. And then as you grow through the billionaire code and you get to that 1 to 3 million, it actually becomes an exercise in letting other people do what you do. Well, probably leveraging sales and having somebody else do sales. It's building systems and processes around what you do well so that you can let go of them. As you get into the to the the the 3 million to 10 million, it's letting go of success. It's actually letting other people create success in your business. You know, you go from from working overtime to delegating time to now delegating success. And then when you get to that 10 to $30 million stage, that's an exercise in letting go, of having other leaders leading in your company, having other people be in charge of outcomes, not just delegating success, but delegating entire portions of your business to someone else. And as you grow past that 10 to 30 million, you're letting go of even more. You are allowing other people to be successful. You are you are delegating in a much more profound way. And even if you're if you're following the billionaire code, you're giving up autonomy and time. You're actually letting go of being in charge of where you spend your time. Because at 10 to 30 million, you want your team to tell you where they need you most. And so this process of letting go, this process of allowing other people, this process of being able to do this is incredibly difficult. And I'm telling you, this first person, this is hard for me, even though I understand it in an intellectual level, I think all of us as entrepreneurs have difficulty in letting go. And here's the reason why you can't let go and maybe the reason why your business is plateaued or not, where you want it to be or not growing where you want it to be. Or maybe the reason why your team isn't taking the initiative you want them to isn't like stepping up like you want them to. In almost every case where an entrepreneur has this issue, the reason we don't let go is trust is we have a lack of trust, and it's not a lack of trust in the people. You may say, no, I love my team, I really trust them. I know they have my back. I know they're trying to do what they need to do. But if you're having trouble letting go, if you're having trouble feeling confident in that letting go, oftentimes the reason that happens is because we don't really have a system in our business that we trust. We don't have processes in our business that we trust. And the primary processes I'm talking to are talking about are really if we had to break them down into categories, it's really three. It's one, creating a plan for what's going to happen next and trusting that plan number two is having a system for executing that plan and making sure that everyone is fully utilizing. Understanding that system to execute the plan. And then three. Having a system in the business where you consistently grow that infrastructure, grow the processes in the business, grow the people in the business. And if we don't have those three systems, if we don't have a planning system, a communication and execution system, and then a process for understanding who to hire next, where to allocate resources, where our investment needs to go in the business. We will have a hard time letting go for any period of time. In fact, you know, the entrepreneurs, they get accused of micromanagement in the later stages of growing a business after they have a team are often entrepreneurs who are just trying to do the right thing. We're just trying to grow the business, we're trying to move it forward, but we don't trust those processes in the business. And if you're in a place where you know, you know that you're in that place where you feel like you need to check on everything and look at everything and understand what everybody's doing and make sure that you've reviewed everything and make sure that you've had eyes on everything. And and it's hard to let go and it's hard to let others in. It's hard to get the full support of your team. Then I want you to ask yourself, is this perhaps an issue? Is the lack of a clear planning system where you state what you're going to get done? Your team is involved in that that process, and then they can get out in front of you and you don't have to watch every single thing that they do. Or maybe it's the lack of a communication execution process where once that plans in place, there's no system, there's no structure through which, you know, everyone on your team is doing the right thing every day. You know, you don't have that that entrepreneurial feeling that all of us have. Believe me, I teach this stuff. I use our systems. I still get it. I mean, that's why when you wake up in the morning or maybe in the middle of the night, even worse. And you think, I wonder what so-and-so is doing? Like, are they actually means being productive? You know, what is this person doing? And, you know, is that that system where we don't have communication in execution in a process or that that symptom where we don't have communication execution in a process, and it causes us to hold on too tight. It causes us to micromanage. It causes us to look at everything. And then that third step, you know, where we don't have processes and structure within the business so that we understand when we need a new person, we understand when we need more resources. We understand when there's software needed. We understand when there's a new promotion needed. If we don't have those things. That's what causes us to white knuckle grow a business and white knuckling. Growing a business is so exhausting when we feel like we need to see everything, when we feel like we need to check everything. Here's what we're really doing is setting ourselves up for massive, continual frustration and disappointment. Because here's here's what I mean by that. When we don't have the plan, when we don't have communication, execution, when we don't know what to do next in the business with clarity, when we don't know how to analyze, to be able to do that, what ends up happening is we feel like we just need to be on top of everything. And that feeling of being on top of everything is exhausting. And then by disappointment, what I mean is when we feel like we have to be on top of everything because we're entrepreneurs, because one of our strengths is seeing deficit, you know, we see deficit in the world and we build around it. And that's how we solve problems. What happens is in a business, when we feel that deficit, we'll go out and start investigating and we'll find it. We will find problems. You know, I always tell entrepreneurs, I always tell myself, your business is broken and things go. If things go well, it always will be because the only business that is perfect is closed. There's no problems with customers and so problems with team, there's no problems with product. It's perfect, it's closed. You don't want a perfect business. You want a business that's adaptable. You want a business that can grow with you, and your business will always be broken. And what happens is when we don't trust our plan and our communication system and our process for determining what to do next, we are constantly looking for what's wrong.