Your Days Should Get Easier

This is the Momentum podcast.

As a business owner, it's one of the hardest concepts to understand that your days have to get tactically easier over time or you are building a house of cards. I'll explain in a minute.

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.

If you've been listening to my podcast for a while or you've been to one of my events or in one of my programs, you've probably heard me say If your days are getting tactically harder, you're building a house of cards. And, you know, when I hear that, oftentimes people say, Hey, what do you mean by that? What what exactly does that mean? And here's what I here's what this means. If you're building a business and you've started to hire a team and your days are getting tactically harder, you're getting more and more overwhelmed in the tactics of the business. And you have a team that means you are becoming or already are the biggest bottleneck. That means if your days are getting tactically harder, the business is too reliant on you. And if your days are getting tactically harder, you are the biggest liability in the business. That is a huge issue that most entrepreneurs don't learn until far too long in their business. And if this is happening to you, I want you to know you're not alone. You know, we're in a period of product improvement right now. You know, from time to time, I decide, hey, I want to make what we do even better, even though we get incredible results for our members, even though our return rate is practically nonexistent. Even though most people in our one year program stay far past their year. I want to make the product even better. And so when I'm doing that, I'll jump on a few sales calls, sometimes a few, sometimes more than if you kind of treat them as avatar interviews. If you've ever heard my podcast on Avatar interviews, you know, it helps me to talk to people firsthand and to understand what's going on. And what I've been hearing lately from people is this. And when I hear every time I get on calls with people who are coming towards us to simplify their operations is that things are getting overwhelming, things are getting harder. You know, the business is growing and it's not getting easier. And I want you to know something. You're not alone if that's how you feel and if you're listening and you're like, Well, how do I do that? How do I make it so things get easier? Understand that if this is your first time up the ladder of building a business, if this is maybe even your second time, your third time that you're reaching new levels that you haven't reached before. It is not easy to understand how to offload tactics and become more strategic in your business. You're not alone. If this is how you're feeling, you're not alone. If you feel stuck in this, you're not alone. If you have that feeling like, Man, if the business grows any more, I'm going to be the one that feels all of it. And it's just, it's, it's it's what happens to us as business owners. Unless you're, like, the most intuitive, most that. So it's thoughtful. I don't. You know why I don't. I've never met anybody who's been able to get around this on their own. Even when I first got around it on the first time, into coaching, into consulting, it just help from other people. Because here's the issue that we all have as entrepreneurs and see if this resonates. You know, when you start your business, you do everything. The challenge is in order to be successful, we do everything. We get conditioned to do everything. We get stuck in this place of. The more I do, the more successful I am. And it is so hard to throw the switch in perception, to throw the switch in, in understanding that now the easier I make things for myself, the more I'm actually building a real business, the more I'm building a resilient business, the more I'm building an adaptable business because I'm offloading what I do on a day to day basis to the people around me so that I'm not the biggest liability this company has, so that there's other people who can do the key things in this company. So there's other people who understand how to keep this company running on a day to day basis. And it is not an easy transition to make. So I don't I don't want to make it sound like it's easy. I don't want to make it sound like it's intuitive. It's anything but. I don't want to make it sound like people just throw a switch and they're able to do it. You really can't. It's not something that just happens. In fact, here's what it takes. It takes understanding a process of how to analyze your time, prioritize what you're doing, commit to delegating and offloading what you shouldn't be doing anymore, executing that delegation, and then doing it again over and over and over again. Because each new stage of business growth, there's going to be things that have become tactical and are no longer strategic. There's going to be things that are strategic that you should be doing that you weren't doing before, and now you should focus on them. And so this is a system. This is a process. This isn't something you do once. This is something you should be doing every single quarter that you own your business. And, you know, I'll give you our process for it. I'll give you that the way that we approach it from a time basis. Now, there's two ways to approach this that we teach. We approach how to teach it, how to do this from a time basis where we analyze your time and we look at what we offload. We also teach how to analyze the processes in your business and look at where you offload or delegate. Today, I'm going to cover time, maybe in the next project. In the next podcast, I'll cover how you do it from a process basis. But here's our process for that. I want you to know how to do this. I want you to be able to do this. I want you to have a shot at doing this even if you don't join our program. I just I don't want you to feel overwhelmed anymore. Now, here's the process we use with all of our members. It works. It actually crushes. It helps our members be able to delegate consistently, be able to understand how to go through that process that I just named, analyze, prioritize, commit, execute, and then, you know, come back and do it again, or what we call renew. And so here's how you analyze your time for two weeks, do a time study, carry around sheets of paper, write down everything you're doing in 15 minute increments so you can see all the little things that you're doing. You know, our minds lie to us. We don't think we're doing as much as we're doing. Most of the time when we're running a business, we don't realize all the little things we're doing. We don't realize how many tactical things we're doing. We just put up with it. Again, successfully starting a business is doing everything, so we feel like doing everything is going to make us successful and we just keep doing it. So for two weeks, write down everything you're doing and then at the end of the two weeks, analyze everything that's on that paper, everything in 15 minute increments. What are you doing that somebody else could potentially do? What are you doing that you shouldn't be doing anymore? What are you doing? That's tactical that somebody could do on an hourly basis? What are you doing that you could offload to somebody else? And that is the question. And then once you have that, you gather together that list of things and then you start asking yourself the question, Can I offload this to people that are already in my organization? Do I need to hire somebody like an E.R., a VA, an assistant of some sort to be able to do some of these things for me? Can I get somebody part time to do these things for me? Is in a new position in the company. So you go through that list of questions and you look at all the things you're doing. You prioritize what's strategic, what isn't. Once you have that list of the things that aren't strategic that you can give to somebody else, you start asking yourself, How am I going to do this? Then you commit to doing it and you spend a quarter offloading. You spend time offloading. You know, that's I say a quarter because we usually have people do time studies once a quarter. If you're in a really fast growth business, there might need to be once every other month. If you're in a hyper fast growth business, you might do two weeks on, two weeks off. And I no joke in some of the faster growing companies that I've worked with that have been on the INC 500 list and been some of the fastest growing companies in the country. We have definitely done two weeks on, two weeks off time studies and so you go through the process of the time study, then the delegation should be a process in itself as well of taking each line item that you have on that list. So you're going to delegate to somebody meeting with that person, explaining the process, documenting the process. Put it in a flow chart so that they understand what you were doing. Telling them the mindset behind the process and what you're doing and what those things are, and then they will stay delegated and you can move into doing more strategic things. And then you increase on a quarterly basis. Offload tactics, increase strategy, offload tactics, increase strategy. You know, oftentimes when we're working with when we take on a company that's at, you know, the $1 million range or $3 million range or whatever number it is, if they've been plateaued for a period of time, you know, there's all kinds of things that can get you out of out of a plateau. But often for us, just the time study itself, the process of going through the time study where the owner of the business recognizes and realizes everything that they've been doing and the things that they don't actually have to be doing. That process itself creates growth in the business, creates a shift in perspective, creates a shift in activity that starts growing the business. And so I want you to try this. Give it a shot. I go through this process of doing the time study. Analyze what you do. Prioritize what you're going to hand off. Commit to handing it off, go through the process of handing it off, then come back and do it again. And this is a process that you will have and that once you do it, once you understand it, once you get good at it, this is one of those things that you can use for the rest of the time, your own business, any business. And it doesn't matter how in the future, maybe, you know, maybe you get to the point where you're not completely overwhelmed, where you're not working 50 hours a week in the business, where it feels good. You do this anyway so that you can continue to clear space for what's coming next. Because as the owner of the business, the last thing you ever want to let creep up on you is tactical overwhelm. It means you're challenging the growth of the business. You're challenging the stability of the business. You're making yourself the biggest bottleneck and the biggest liability. This process will help you change a lot, and if you get good at it, it will help you continue to keep yourself in that strategic place. Because if you're a business owner and you've felt like you're out of momentum recently or you feel like you're frustrated with the business or things just aren't going how you want them to be, you're not feeling that excitement about the business. Here's my experience. Talking to thousands of entrepreneurs in the career that I've had is that oftentimes we feel that lack of momentum, we feel that constraint, we feel that frustration because we're not operating at a strategic level. It's because we're stuck in the weeds, we're doing the tactics, we're doing the things. Instead of doing what we do best as entrepreneurs, we get up every day. We go into the future, we create a new reality. We come back to the present and we demand it becomes real. And if we don't do that often enough, our frustration level can go through the roof. We start feeling like we're in constraint, we start feeling like we're out of momentum. And that is one that is not one of the it's probably the worst feeling we have as entrepreneurs is being out of momentum and not feeling that forward progress. So if you try this out, if you go through this process, let me know. I'd love to hear about it. I'm super available on social media. You can tag me in a post about it. Even if you have a question, you can tag me in the post and if you're ready to simplify the operations of your business and start growing your business predictably and have systems to go from tactical to strategic, but even better have systems to communicate, to execute, and to know that every member of your team is fully utilized and doing what they should be so that you can grow your business faster and have higher profitability. Go to simple operations dot com and register for a call for us. You never know. You register in the next few weeks. I might be the person who jumps on a call with you and I'd love to connect with you. Simple operations dot com. We look forward to hearing from you. And remember, if your days are getting tactically harder, you're building a house of cards. Use the process that I shared as the exit and you will build a real business that's resilient, adaptable, and can overcome what goes on in the market, what goes on with competition and anything else. Simple operations dot com. We look forward to hearing from you.