#1 Reason You Are Stuck in The Day to Day

This is the Momentum podcast. As entrepreneurs, we start businesses, we become entrepreneurs for a lot of reasons. And one of those main reasons, one of the most talked about reasons, one of the reasons that entrepreneurs share most often is freedom. And we move into this space of entrepreneurship and we put up with all the challenges and frustration and anxiety that it causes because we want to create freedom in our lives. But I also often joke with entrepreneurs that we are that small percentage of the population that will go from a 9 to 5 and commit to a 9 to 11. And I don't mean in the morning so that we can create freedom. And for far too many of us, that is where we start and that's where we get stuck. There is a reason you are stuck in the tactics in the day to day of your business. There's a reason you're working too hard. There's a reason you're working too much. In this podcast, I share the number one reason why you are stuck in your business. 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. Our company. Simple operations exist to do one thing. We want to help entrepreneurs stop feeling like they are stuck in the tactical day to day of their businesses. You know, the numbers don't lie. Most entrepreneurs not only are stuck in the tactical day to day of their businesses, they live in the day to day, their businesses. Pre-COVID numbers. There were 29 million businesses in the United States. 22 million of them are under $100,000 a year. They're stuck in a place where they're barely even making revenue, barely even making money. The average entrepreneur, according to those numbers, makes about $60,000 a year, which isn't that much. In fact, most entrepreneurs have the talent and the experience to go out and make more working for somebody else. But we stay working in our own businesses because we want to create freedom and then we get stuck. And there is a primary reason why entrepreneurs are stuck in the tactical day-to-day of their business, regardless of what size the business is. Now, when your business is only one person, I've got news for you. You're going to have to do a lot. You're going to have to do the tactics you're going to have to achieve in order to get out of that situation. And it is what it is. That's how it is when you start a business. But once you start building the team, once you have people around you, once you start building leadership on your team, your tactical involvement in the business should be going down. In fact, I often share if your days are getting tactically harder, you're building a house of cards. I'll say that one more time. If your days are getting tactically harder, you are building a house of cards. And here's what I mean by that. If on a day to day basis you feel like you're doing more for the business, if on a day to day basis you feel like the business needs more from you. More time from you. More tactical involvement. Not strategic involvement. More tactical involvement. If on a day to day, day to day basis, you are taking on more responsibility in the business, you are building a house of cards. And here's what I mean by that. Far too many entrepreneurs grow their businesses by doing everything themselves, and then they grow the organization and they have people around them. But they're micromanaging those people. They're tactically manage mean those people. Tactical management is just painful. It's where we tell somebody what to do. Check that it got done. Tell them what to do again, check that it got done. Tell them what to do again, check it got done. You're probably getting exhausted just hearing me say that. I know I'm feeling it by just saying it. And transformational leadership is a totally different way of leading people. And it's the converse or the opposite of tactical management. Transformational leadership is where we get people in our business clear outcomes. Then we coach success along the way. We answer their questions, we give them advice, we tell them how we've done things in the past, we help them and then we get leverage results. And here's what I mean by leverage results. If somebody is chasing a clear outcome and you're coaching their success and you're helping them along the way, you're showing them how you make decisions, you're duplicating decision making, you're growing that person, you're making them more valuable for the company, and then you get leverage results. And those leverage results are the fact that you're doing less tactically. That person is now more capable in your business of doing things tactically, and you're not stuck in that circular process of micromanaging, that tactical management of telling people what to do, checking that it got done, telling them what to do again, because it's exhausting. It's exhausting for us as entrepreneurs. It drains us like very little else can drain us in our lives and in what we do. And the challenge for most of us in growing a business is that we are stuck in the place of tactical management because we don't have clear outcomes at our company. And people ask me all the time, What's the number one reason that businesses don't grow? What's the number one thing that I can think of why entrepreneurs don't grow? What's the number one reason why businesses don't continue to do well or businesses stop growing or they regress or they go out of business? And for me, there's a ton of answers to those questions. But the main thing that I see over and over again for why entrepreneurs are stuck in their business and they build that house of cards is that they don't know how to build a plan to execute with their team. They don't have clarity around how to actually build a plan, show the team that plan, and then execute that plan with a team. And when I say a business plan, I want to make something very clear. I think business plans have gotten a bad rap because we've all seen business plan building software. If you were in any type of business class in school, you probably saw things like business plan where you write a thesis statement and a market differentiation statement and you do all kinds of weird projections and you create this quote unquote business plan. And in some cases, that plan is used to go get funding. And, you know, you're kind of like making the argument for the company. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is having a process in your organization where you analyze what the company needs. You prioritize the things that you and your team will do. You build those into a written plan that you commit to as a team, and then you and your team go out and execute that plan. And then you renew by saying, How do we do an execution? Let's do it again. And you have this consistent way of analyzing, prioritizing, committing, executing and renewing as a team where everyone on the team is learning that process. Everyone on the team is learning that system. And when you do that, when you have a clear written plan that the team can execute, you achieve that first step of transformational leadership where you're giving people clear outcomes, where you can coach their success and you get leveraged results. And when you have a clear executable plan, here's what happens. Suddenly the team knows what they need to be doing. People don't need you to tell them what to do. Check that it got done and tell them what to do again. You get out of that place of tactical management. You know, when most entrepreneurs say they're terrible managers, By the way, I agree. I'm a terrible manager. If I have to tell people what to do and then check that it got done and tell them what to do again, then check that it got done. I have had the second or third time I'm doing that. I'm frustrated and I'm anxious. I'm not the nicest person to be around. I'm probably making the people around me. Not probably. I am definitely making the people around me frustrated and anxious and not feel so great. And I'm probably challenging their productivity and I'm challenging my own productivity and I'm not feeling good about myself as a person. All of those things happen just from being in tactical management. But when I'm in a place of transformational leadership where my team knows where they're going, they can get out in front of me and go chase down the outcomes that we want. And they come to me when there's a challenge where there's an issue I can coach, I can lead. I can help them discover what they should be doing. I can help them understand what they should be doing next. Those are things that actually come natural to me and probably come natural to you. If you're an entrepreneur, think of how often somebody comes to you with an issue or a challenge, maybe from your business or just in your life and you're able to help them move forward. That is who we are as entrepreneurs. We see the solutions. We can help people find the solutions. But when the team doesn't know what they're going, where they're going, when your team, anybody on your team doesn't have a clear outcome, when collectively they don't understand what the outcomes are, you're left in that place of having to be in that tactical management, in that place that exhausts us, that frustrates us, that creates anxiety. And so for me, the number one reason why entrepreneurs get stuck in the tactics of their business is they don't know how. They don't have a process so they don't have a repeatable system to create a clear plan that you can execute every 30 days. And there's a lot of people who talk about, you know, 90 day execution plans. I like to break it down one more time. I want 12 measurement periods in the year, not not four. I want 12 opportunities for my team to build a plan, execute so we can see what we're capable of. I want a faster pace of growth in my company. So I want 12 periods of execution, not just four. And when you have this clear plan that the team sees, it will completely change the perspective of every member on the team because they now know where they're going. Like I said earlier, they can get out in front of you. They can anticipate what's needed next. They can ask more intelligent questions. They can understand the vision that you have as an entrepreneur, which is such a key part for us. Being a visionary is making sure the people around us understand the vision When it's written into a clear, executable plan with all the steps it is going to take for the next 30 days. It's no longer this obscure or hard to understand or hard to see vision. It's an actual executable plan. And when you put this in place in your business, you will find yourself getting unstuck in the tactics. You will find yourself elevating out of the day to day of the business. You will find yourself no longer feeling like you have to check everything, look at everything, understand everything that everybody is doing because it's all spelled out in an executable plan and your team becomes better at executing, better at doing what you need them to do, better at moving the business forward. And. This is one of those principles, one of those concepts that in the entrepreneurial world rarely gets discussed, because most of what we're sold, most of what we're encouraged to do in the entrepreneurial world is marketing and sales and putting ourselves out there. But rarely does somebody say, Hey, does your team really understand what you're doing? Does your team have a clear plan of everything that's going on in the business? Is there enough clarity that they know what they're going to be doing for the next month so that they can go get everything done and help you achieve your vision? And if you can't answer yes to those questions, then you have a massive opportunity in your business. If you can't answer questions or yes to those questions, you, your business and things are already going well for you. I can't tell you how excited I am for you because when you put a plan in place, the clarity with which your team will respond, the amount that you can get done, the progress you can make, goes up exponentially. This is not a one plus one equals two. This is where you put a plan in the business and suddenly everyone on the team can do exponentially more, not a percentage more, but exponentially more. And this is what you can achieve as a team goes up like crazy. And it totally changes the dynamic of what you think you're capable of and what your team believes they're capable of. And this is one of those things that when you put it in place in a business, it's often the catalyst for the growth, the impact and the income that you've always known should be there, but for some reason has felt elusive and hard to access and hard to get to. It's not intuitive to think what's missing here is a plan. But when you've worked with as many organizations as I have and you watch them go from struggling and frustrated and entrepreneurs doing too much and feeling like they want to go back to doing it all themselves, and then they put a planning system in place and suddenly everybody on the team gets better at what they do. The entrepreneur sees entirely new possibilities in what they're capable of. The team members are growing like crazy and the company grows in its influence and in its income. It's one of those things that so consistently proves that the number one reason why people are stuck in their business, why an entrepreneur is starting their business, is there's not an executable plan. If you're interested in putting an executable plan in place in your business, if you have a company that's already growing and you're looking for that next level of growth, if you already have a team that is doing well and you want to see them grow exponentially and you want to get out of the day to day so you can be the visionary you were always meant to be and step up strategically and come to that next level of growth for you as a company. Reach out to us. We love to help you with this. It's what we obsess over every single day. We help entrepreneurs around the world create the systems in their business so that they can simplify their operations, become the visionaries they've always known they should be, and grow their influence, their income and their affluence at an exponential rate. We want to help you go to simple operations dot com register for a call with my team. We love to jump on and very quickly help you understand where the opportunities are in your business. Help you build a plan to get there and start executing like crazy simple operations dot com. We're looking forward to connecting with you. And remember, if you want to elevate out of the day to day of your business, your team needs to know where you're going. The faster you can give them an executable plan, the faster you will be the visionary you've always known you should be. If you don't have the business that you want, you haven't become the person who can run it yet. Let us help you get there. Simple operations dot com.