EP 270
[00:00:00] Have you ever felt like you want to build a really big business, but also you wanna have a really great big life? And somewhere along the way, you started wondering if actually it's even possible and if you actually have to choose. Maybe you want significant revenue, maybe you want a big team, multiple locations, or even multiple businesses.
Maybe you want a recognizable brand, financial freedom, wealth, impact, and maybe even a legacy. So you have big ambitions, but you also want to travel, you want to spend time with people you love, and you don't want to wait till you're old to do that. You want to have important hobbies and actually experience life and not miss on the most important parts of it
[00:01:00] And you don't want to spend every waking hour answering emails, taking calls, solving problems, and being the person everybody in the business depends on. So maybe you've wondered, can I actually have both? Can I build something substantial without making my life smaller? And I do believe the answer is yes, but, and this is a big but, you probably can't build it the way you've been taught to be- build a successful business.
And that's what I wanna talk about today, because I do believe that we have accepted a very narrow definition of what entrepreneur success is supposed to look like.
And then we've stopped questioning the way we're told we have to get there
I can't stop but thinking about it. Maybe the problem isn't what's possible. Just think about the four-minute mile. I don't know if you've heard that story, [00:02:00] but for a very long time, running a mile under four minutes was considered something that humans simply couldn't do. And then Roger Bannister did it in 1954 for the very first time in human history, or at least the ones that we recorded.
And then suddenly, very shortly, other people started doing it, too. Why? Because once somebody demonstrated that something was possible, the mental barrier changed, and it changed not for the person who originally questioned the assumptions or the beliefs, but very quickly changed for others to the point where that record was beat very shortly after. And I think business can be similar. We've collectively decided that if you wanna build a really successful business, you have to hustle. You have to work all the time, sacrifice your weekends, [00:03:00] vacations, the relationships that are important to you in life need to be put on hold, that you have to answer all the phone calls at all hours and be as obsessed.
You have to go through sleepless nights, and ideally, you should start that business when you're 20 because by the time you're 40 or 50, it's way too late for you.
We're just accepting that maybe we have to give everything to the business, and if you don't wanna do that, then maybe you don't want it badly enough, or success is not important to you, or maybe you're not ambitious enough, or you know what? You can't have it
But here is what I want you to consider. What if the limitation isn't what's possible? What if the limitation is that we've collectively stopped questioning the way we're told success has to be achieved in business? Because maybe the problem isn't that you can't build the business you want while having the life you want, but maybe you just [00:04:00] simply never been shown how to build it that way, and you've never questioned that way of thinking and tried to figure out a different way
And I think it's a very important conversation to have, and it's a different conversation than scaling through hustle. Because of course you are allowed to want a big business. And I wanna make it clear, when I talk about having a big life, I'm not telling you that you should be satisfied with a small business in order to live.
This is not my philosophy. If you wanna build a big business that generates millions and millions of dollars of revenue and helps thousands or millions of clients, go for it. And if you want a large team and multiple locations or multiple companies or significant impact, and through that wealth for you and your family, financial freedom, creating jobs for [00:05:00] others, legacy, go for it
Because the dream you have was given to you, and you are uniquely positioned to make it come true, right? All of us are given dreams and desires, and every single person has different ones, and that's what makes us amazing as human beings, right? If we go after our desires and dreams, we create so many wonderful things in this world So if you wanna see how far you can take your ambitions as an entrepreneur, go for it because that ambition is yours. It's been put into you by whatever you believe, God, universe.
So you definitely don't have to apologize for being ambitious. I don't. I'm ambitious. I don't apologize for it. And wanting to build wealth doesn't make you greedy. Wanting to build something significant doesn't mean you automatically care less about your [00:06:00] family and people close to you. Wanting a big business doesn't also mean that you have to become a person who lives at work and spends 24/7 there
I truly think we should stop putting those things against each other because the question isn't do you want a big business or do you want a life? The question is, or should be, how do I build a big business that allows me to have the life I want? And that's because we have only one life to live, or at least one that we're aware of in the moment, and life is too short not to live it
Now here is where we get into something I talk about with my clients all the time. If you want the business to grow significantly, you have to evolve as the owner because your business cannot outgrow you, right? The way you operate when you're doing 100,000, 200,000 of revenue a year might not [00:07:00] be the way you need to operate when you're doing a million, 10 million or $100 million a year.
So your role changes, your decisions change, your skills have to evolve, your leadership has to evolve and grow, your relationship with the business has to change. And one of the biggest transitions I see business owners needing to make is going from being first the expert who makes everything happen to then becoming the owner and the leader who builds something that can operate and grow beyond them
Because of course, when you're the best technician or the best therapist or the best organizer, or whatever your profession happens to be, you can become bottleneck. Your expertise is probably what got the business started, right? You loved your profession, and you wanted to help clients your way. But [00:08:00] eventually, that thing that makes you successful can become the thing that limits your growth.
And that's why personal growth and business skills leadership growth are so important for every business owner and connected. Because the next level of your business will always require the next level of you, whether it's you growing as a leader, you growing in your capacity to handle complexity, you growing in your ability to prioritize better, you growing in your ability to lead people who do things differently and sometimes better than you. You might need to become a better decision-maker, delegator, communicator. You might need to manage your stress differently, and by managing stress differently, it's really growing your capacity. I [00:09:00] always give this example to my clients. When we're small children, and let's say we got a balloon, and we're so happy about this balloon, and then we lose it, and it's a helium balloon, and up it goes in the air.
And you can see a small toddler just crying as if their world ended, right? Because for them, this balloon is a big deal, and their emotional capacity hasn't been developed yet. And then once you become an adolescent, losing a balloon is not a big deal. You don't even sweat it.
Off it went, right? Because your emotional capacity grew. And somehow we're led to believe that as adults, our emotional capacity is static. We cannot grow it anymore. But it's not true. We can actually handle more stressful things with calm and poise and just solution-based oriented if you grow yourselves.
And you have to do it when you [00:10:00] scale the business because if you're sweating small stuff, you can't have a big business, right? If you're spending a lot of time sweating small stuff once you're growing, if you don't expand your emotional capacity, a bigger business by definition will be more complex. You have to be able to deal with challenges or problems that a bigger business comes without losing your mind.
And you can do that by learning how to manage your stress differently, how to solve problems differently, how to think strategically better Or how to be comfortable not knowing everything and not having everything dependent on you once you start building a team
You m- you might need to learn how to let other people do things differently than you would And an anecdote I wanna bring, that I [00:11:00] also sometimes share is when my dad was asking me when we were teenagers visiting him, my parents were divorced, to help him with the dishwashing. And I was, I learned or figured out one way to wash dishes with my mom, and he had a different system, and he was always trying to get me to do it his way, and I would always, resist and say "What is it that you want?
Do you want me to wash the dishes your way, and that's more important, or do you want the help washing dishes and getting it done? Then let me do it my way." So like as a leader, it's not about controlling all the time every step your employees take and how they do things. It's about having them help you create bigger and better outcomes with sometimes doing things differently than you would
So I think that the emotional side of leadership, as much as [00:12:00] technical or business side of business, are equally important, and it's a huge part of the work I do with my clients because I believe that work actually allows you to have both, grow the business and have an amazing life
So what I've just talked about really is connected to the capacity that you need as you scale. And I talked about it in the recent episode 269 so I highly encourage you to go and listen to it because
But I do wanna show you why this matters, because growth creates demand, and demand requires capacity, different parts of it or different types of it.
I have a new client who actually runs a car shop and wants to build a group of companies in the automotive industry. And when we [00:13:00] started working together, one of the things I identified that was the first roadblock to him taking his business to the levels he wants to take is his own capacity. He was maxed out.
He reached the point where there was simply too much going on, and he was getting too overstressed. It was taking too much of a toll on him to the point where he didn't have room and brain space to even think about scaling
So that's where our work started, to create more capacity in him as the business owner, as a human. Less stress, less overwhelm, more space in his brain to actually think strategically, right? Because if your brain is constantly operating in survival mode, you do not have room or capacity to think about the future and to solve for that
But then of course, once you have that, then if your demand grows, [00:14:00] of course you need delivery capacity, and that's... I always think about an experience I've had in my corporate career, right? The company I was working for, signed two major contracts at the same time, which was great news.
The company was growing, more revenue, more business, more clients. Except we hadn't built the delivery capacity to actually serve all of those clients and deliver what was promised to them by the sales team. So suddenly, my service delivery department was expected to take on all of this additional work without resources and capacity required to do it well.
And what happens? Chaos happened. Clients weren't happy, people were exhausted, performance suffered, morale suffered, people left, and eventually I burned out. So yeah, growth was there, but it wasn't sustainable growth, [00:15:00] right? And that's the distinction. So you don't scale by simply working more, you scale by building capacity.
I talk about all those different types of capacity in episode 269, so check it out. Listen to it it will show you how those different types of capacity interact between the leadership, the team, the delivery systems and processes. Like if you think about it, if as an owner you don't grow, then your leadership skills will not grow. And if leadership doesn't grow, it will be hard for you to grow a great team.
Then if you can't build a great team, then your delivery capacity suffers
So building a bigger business is not just about how do I get more clients? It's about what will this business need from [00:16:00] me, my team, and my systems at the next level, and kinda go from there Now, you get to decide what kind of business you do want to build, and that's another belief that I really want you to take away from this episode.
You get to decide
How your business looks and what size it is and how you run it. And I know that this sounds obvious, but you would be amazed how many business owners don't actually think this through and build it intentionally. They just go with what everybody else is doing in their industry. I had a client who was a mortgage broker, and we were talking about his business and the way he really wanted to build it and run it, and also the life that he wanted to lead while doing it.
At some point Throughout our [00:17:00] conversations, I did tell him, "Hey you don't have to build your business the way everybody in your industry does if it doesn't align with also the life you're trying to live or you're trying to create." And that was a huge aha moment for him that he shared with me afterwards, because he had been looking around, looking at his industry, seeing how other successful mortgage brokers operated, and then automatically assume that, said that, "This is how my industry works, and therefore I have to do that in order to be successful."
But it didn't work for him. He didn't want to travel. He wanted to be able to be working from other places or not work at all while on vacation and not answer, calls from real estate agents 24/7.
So what I told him was, "You get to decide." That's the beautiful [00:18:00] thing about being the business owners. You get to decide what your business looks like, how you serve clients, who you serve, how available you are, what your team does what you personally do, what you don't do, how big you want to grow.
And yes, of course, there's always you wanna look at the clients and the market and how it's changing. It's not... I'm not talking here about being blind to that, but taking that and still making intentional decisions that align with your goals, that align with what you're trying to create
And I'm not saying also that you can create a big life and big business without maybe making some sacrifices or that you just magically declare what you want and it just happens. No. But what I'm saying is you can intentionally decide what you're willing to [00:19:00] sacrifice and what you're not willing to sacrifice.
And the simplest example I can give you is when I was building my business on the side while still in my corporate job
and pursuing my online MBA and having small kids through COVID at home I looked at my schedule and thought intentionally about, "Okay, how do I make this happen?" I want to be there for my kids. There was also some volunteering that I wanted to do, but I also want to start this business, and I wanna finish my MBA because those were my goals.
Those were things that are important, that were important to me. And I also didn't wanna, again, compromise the time with my family. And I look at my schedule and I realized, which I didn't before, that I was definitely spending way too much time watching TV, that I could easily cut a [00:20:00] lot of that out because it wasn't even important to me and then there was a couple of other things that was secondary importance. And then through that, I created time capacity to do what I wanted to do without that affecting, let's say, my family time or my volunteering time So if you want, let's say, more freedom, and you don't wanna be tied to your business 24/7 while still growing it, you have to build systems, team, right?
Hire people, build processes, and have leadership that create that freedom. If you wanna step away from the day-to-day, you have to build a business that doesn't depend on you for every decision If you want to travel without your phone glued to your hand, but still serve your clients at the highest level, you need to build the capacity [00:21:00] inside your business to operate without you, which is 100% possible, but it has to be done intentionally.
Freedom isn't the absence of responsibility, it's just having the ability to make meaningful choices and then take actions to build the business that makes those choices possible
And I truly believe that your life doesn't have to wait until some day, because we truly don't know how long we're gonna live. We don't know how long we're even gonna have our health, right? So waiting till some magic day is very risky. It might not happen. We don't even know how long we will have with the people we love.
So We can't control and predict the circumstances that life is going to bring us. So I'm all for building the business, [00:22:00] working hard, being ambitious, building wealth, creating impact and opportunities, and see how far you can take yourself, and at the same time, not putting everything else into the someday category.
Because the someday is not guaranteed.
I grew up in Europe, and one of the culture differences I've noticed in North America is that this very strong idea of working now so someday you can finally live. It's almost like people live to work for a long period of their lives, and I don't fully buy it. Like in Europe, we work to live, and- We don't postpone life because we don't know how long we're gonna have it.
And it doesn't mean that when you focus on your business and you're trying to create some impact and build something meaningful, again, you don't have any sacrifices. [00:23:00] You do. I've made sacrifices myself. And there were periods of my life when maybe I worked longer or, I got up earlier and so on, but I wasn't putting my entire personal life on hold to build, let's say, my professional career
Because what I realized is that the more intentional I became on how I used my time and the more of high-performing habits I developed, I could accomplish, and still can more and more, so much in a limited period of time, which then makes me very effective within the time that I'm willing to, let's say, spend on my business, and then allows me to have and create time for other parts of my life.
So I'm not saying, A, you don't sacrifice, but I'm saying you get to choose what you sacrifice. [00:24:00] And also, going back to growing yourself as a business owner, you can develop some strong, great habits that will help you operate at a way different level than you might be operating right now, the same way an Olympic athlete operates at a very different level than an amateur sports lover of their discipline
Because there's a huge difference between intentionally giving up something that doesn't matter much to you and sacrificing the people, the experiences, and parts of yourself that actually matter deeply just because you convinced yourself that simply is the price of success. I don't believe it has to be
So here is the question I wanna leave you with today. Think about
What kind of business are you actually building? [00:25:00] And what kind of life do you want that business to make possible? Not just how much revenue do I want or how many clients I want to sign this month or this year. Because your answer to that question should influence the way you build the business
If you want a business that gives you freedom, wealth, or impact, or the one that operates without you, or a combination of that, build for that. Be intentional about it
And just don't wait until you're completely exhausted, overwhelmed, or trapped inside the business that you hate, or you ask yourself, "How did I get here?" to start designing it that way. You can do it today, this moment, and it starts by being clear on what is it that I want. So many people don't know that
Ultimately, because the sooner you start [00:26:00] building the business you actually want to own, the easier it is to grow into it
I think that's the biggest message I want you to take from this episode. You don't have to choose between extraordinary ambition and a meaningful life. You don't have to make yourself smaller in business to have a life, or you don't have to make your life smaller in order to build something substantial.
But if you want both, you do need to build differently, right? You have to grow yourself, build capacity for you and within the business and to get to the point where you can hire people and develop them and know how to lead them. You have to create systems and processes that support that growth.
You gotta understand your clients so well. You have to make intentional decisions every day about the business you're building
And [00:27:00] as they say, a lot of those decisions is saying no to a lot of things and saying yes to a very few, but the most important ones
So once you asked yourself what kind of business you're actually building and what kind of life you want that business to make possible, then ask yourself follow-up question, is the business I'm building today actually capable of doing that, creating the life that I want tomorrow and growing to the point that it...
my true ambition wants? And if the answer is no, that's okay, right? You don't have to have it all figured out today, but you want to start thinking about it and taking steps towards what you truly want. And it starts with building yourself and then building the business, the capacity, and the life you want
So happy [00:28:00] Friday. I hope this was helpful. Talk to you soon. Bye
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