Transcribed by Descript

Erin Marcus: Over the last couple of weeks, I have found myself saying this one thing to several different people. We've been talking about how do you get over the bridge, right? You know, me and my metaphors is visuals. How do you get over the bridge from solopreneur entrepreneur and into being a business owner? And one of the things that's come up over and over and over again is That it's not more work.

Erin Marcus: It's not even harder work. Well, it's harder work. It's not more work. It's scarier work, right? It's not more work. It's scarier work. As you worked across the bridge from solopreneur to business owner, as you worked across the bridge from being the business into owning the business, it's not More work, it's scarier work.

Erin Marcus: And this is actually what keeps people from being able to cross that bridge. Because if you're just thinking about needing to do more work, you're going to retreat back to where you were. Because after all, you are already most likely out of hours in the days and days in the week. And So you can't really think about the journey and the process of becoming a business owner as doing more work.

Erin Marcus: You have to start thinking about how can you do it differently. How can it all be different, which is also why it's so scary. It can feel like you're moving away from doing the thing that you love, the thing that made you launch your business in the first place, and moving into doing things you might not love.

Erin Marcus: But a lot of times you don't love them because you're not good at them yet, right? So they make you uncomfortable, they're scary. But if you think about it, you used to not be good at other things that are now no longer a big deal. Right? We used to do all sorts of things in our businesses when you started out that took forever and now they're no big deal.

Erin Marcus: So how do you do this? I love this metaphor of a bridge because so many times, if you've heard me say this before, so many times we think like, Oh, it's just a journey, right? We talk about the journey to becoming a business owner, the entrepreneurial journey, and we think we're going to cross this bridge.

Erin Marcus: That is made out of stones, and it's got a beautiful creek and a garden around it. When, in fact, it feels much more like the Indiana Jones Bridge that's on fire, and there's a guy with a sword at the other end. And so we retreat. And too many times I watch people retreat to the business they think they can pull off.

Erin Marcus: Which is another way of saying they're settling. They're settling for what they think they can do instead of creating what it is that they want, because getting over the bridge to becoming a business owner is. It's different work. It's scarier work. So how do we do this? Let's get tactical on some things you can be doing now as we're getting into December and getting into the end of the year and people start revisiting, okay, what is next year going to look like?

Erin Marcus: Revisiting our plan. So what do you need to do? So number one, you have to get massively clear. Like, massively clear on everything. Not just how much revenue you want to make. I've talked about this before. The dollar amount that you want to make is the beginning of setting your intentions, not the end of it.

Erin Marcus: You don't stop there. What type of business do you want to have? How do you want to spend your day? Who is on your team? What resources do you have access to? Massively clear, taking an inventory of what you have, and massively clear about where you want to end up, because you cannot build an action plan.

Erin Marcus: If you don't know what you're building, but you cannot build an action plan without massive clarity on what you're building, use whatever metaphor helps you with this. But let's go with this idea of a building. If you're going to build a building, right? Building buildings, construction, massive, massive clarity down to the square inch.

Erin Marcus: Your business is no less complicated and no less important than that. So if your business, we're talking about business owner, scalable, profitable businesses. If your business is no less important than that and no less complex than that. What are you doing? What the heck are we doing? Trying to create it.

Erin Marcus: Without an action plan, a step by step plan. I'll give you an example of how this, keeping with our building a building analogy here, I'll give you an example of this blew my mind. I was a kid, I was a teenager. And when I was in high school, we used to go to McDonald's all the time, it was right around the corner.

Erin Marcus: And one day, what felt like one day, they moved the McDonald's from this side of the street to the other side of the street, you know, God only knows why, but they moved the McDonald's across the street. I swear it took like an hour and a half. Like, one day they closed the McDonald's and like a week later they opened a McDonald's.

Erin Marcus: Aside from the city of Chicago and permits and things and inspections. The reason that they're able to build a McDonald's. in what feels like an hour and a half of time is because they have such a specific plan and they've done it so many times that they have a team who is just absolutely phenomenal at building the McDonald's.

Erin Marcus: It's like, poof, new McDonald's. How clear is your action plan? How clear is your action plan? What you have and where you want to go. So step number one on getting over the bridge from entrepreneur, solopreneur and into business owner is massive clarity on what you have. And where you want to go. So, step number two.

Erin Marcus: You have to stop thinking tactically and start thinking strategically. And this means a deep dive into making sure not only the clarity from step one, but that everything's been reverse engineered and is pointing in the same direction. That all of your assets are pointing in that direction. Your brand, your content, your offers.

Erin Marcus: How you deliver your offers, your client avatar, all of your assets need to be pointing in the same direction so that we can think strategically and not tactically, right? There's two ways to think about being a business owner that is very, very different than being a solopreneur. I've, I've I've heard one of these a lot.

Erin Marcus: I've said this a lot. I've heard it in so many different places. Number one, being a CEO is a thinking job, not a doing job. So let's go, you need to think strategically being a CEO is a thinking job, not a doing job. The job of CEO is to cast the vision. That's what that means. Cast the vision. The second one I've heard more recently, a friend said to me, they interpret the job of a CEO is.

Erin Marcus: allocating resources. And I love how these two things go together. The job of a CEO of a business owner is allocating resources, people, money, energy, talent, allocating resources. So if you start to look at these two different ways of being a business owner, that it's a thinking job, not a doing job, and that your job is to future cast and then allocate resources.

Erin Marcus: This is not about posting three times a week instead of once a week. This is not about going to four networking events instead of two networking events. Those are tactical in nature and they're incremental in nature, right? Will they get you a return on your investment? Sure. Will they get you the return on your investment that turns you from a solopreneur into a business owner?

Erin Marcus: Probably not. Do you need to start there to get the ball rolling? Absolutely. But if you stay there, if you stay there, you start to get a reduction on your return, you know, rate on your return on investment, which brings us to number three. Number three is you need to revisit how you see yourself, how you see yourself.

Erin Marcus: So if number one is clarity around what you have and where you want to go. And number two is to start thinking strategically instead of tactically. on how to create your action plan. Number three is where the real scary stuff comes in, and that's revisiting how you see yourself, how you've been labeling yourself, how you identify yourself.

Erin Marcus: The way you see yourself has gotten you to exactly where you are right now. Perfect. Wonderful. But if you want to cross the bridge into true business owner, you have to literally be able to see yourself on the other side of that bridge. This is the hard work. This is the scary work, business plans, branding websites, content creation, sales experts.

Erin Marcus: This is not hard. And the reason I say that it's not hard is because you can purchase it. You can buy it. There's amazing, amazing, brilliant experts out there who are poised to help you at any moment. And you can buy that. Which is fantastic! Changing how you see yourself and being willing to present your new self to the world, that's hard, that's scary, that's the different work.

Erin Marcus: That's the different work. It's hard, it's scary, and it's completely possible. It's completely possible! After all, you've created the version of yourself that you have now. You've literally created it. You get to create the next iteration as well. And you've actually done this before. You've actually reiterated

Erin Marcus: I don't know about you, but I am so not the same person I was in high school. Not the same person I was in college. I'm not the same person I was in corporate. If you've left a job, whether you were fired from that job or left voluntarily, and now, instead of getting another job, you started your own business, you have changed how you see yourself and what you present to the world.

Erin Marcus: You've done this before. Did you become a spouse? Did you become a parent? You have changed your identity and your label previously. Sometimes with intention, and sometimes through the passage of time. Hopefully an ounce of maturity here and there. But you've done it. You've done it. Step number three is to take this concept and add intention to it.

Erin Marcus: And make sure that it's not being done by being stuck in reaction mode to external factors. Parent, spouse, like some of that is, happens through the passage of time, and so that to me is somewhat of an external factor. But what if you took the fact that you know that you've done this before, and you can do this again, and you put intention around it.

Erin Marcus: You put intention around it. When you add these three things together, when you add these three things together, of the clarity around what you want. And then the clarity around what you have to do and then the clarity around who you need to be to do it and add all that to thinking strategically instead of just tactically and incrementally, that is how you get over the bridge from solopreneur and entrepreneur and into true business.