071: There Is No Overnight Success: How Leaders Build Lasting Impact

Money makes stuff easy, but it's not everything. The real challenge lies in breaking through those invisible barriers that keep your business from reaching its full potential.

Ever felt stuck in your business growth? You're not alone. Successful entrepreneurs often hit plateaus where traditional strategies no longer work, leading to years of stagnation. The breakthrough? Realizing you're not the smartest person in the room.

This raw conversation unveils how peer groups transform business trajectories by connecting you with others who've walked your path. When you surround yourself with diverse perspectives and expertise, you discover solutions you never considered. As one business owner candidly shares, after joining a peer group in 2022, their company finally broke free from years of stagnant performance.

The dialogue tackles the myth of overnight success, revealing how true business growth happens through consistent small improvements—"a little bit of a little bit." Just as weight gain doesn't happen overnight, neither does sustainable success. It's built through daily habits, continuous learning, and the humility to adapt.

Most revealing is the admission that ego prevents growth. "No book can teach me how to run my business" was the mindset that kept one successful entrepreneur from scaling further. After finally reading business books like "Traction" after a ten-year hiatus from learning, everything changed. The message becomes clear: success at any level requires constantly evolving your knowledge and approaches.

Ready to break through your own business plateau? Join us to discover how small habit changes, peer connections, and continuous learning create the foundation for sustainable growth. Subscribe now and share your own business breakthrough moments!

Chapters

• 0:00 Money as a tool, not everything
• 1:36 The myth of overnight success
• 2:36 Breaking business stagnation with peer groups
• 5:26 Growth challenges beyond the first million
• 9:06 The importance of continuous learning
• 10:36 Building success through better habits
• 12:54 Knowledge sharing among smart peers

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Money is a tool. Money actually makes a lot of stuff easy, but it's not everything. The first year in retail, after we went door knocking and get a lot of business, my income was higher than what it is today. It's crazy and it's really really. I would say after a few years, if I stayed it would have been very easy money right. There's no overnight success. This is, this is overnight success. Is some a lot of times illegal, but yeah, there's no over overnight success.

Speaker 1: 0:48

People look at me. It's like I have friends look at it's like, hey, you're very successful man, you just made it like it was like this. It was like, no, it wasn't like this. Uh, I put a lot of hours, I put a lot of, a lot of heart into it, a lot of thinking, a lot of, and the road to own your own business on your own is freaking lonely like it's. So you gotta make decisions on the top of decisions and you're affecting everyone around you and just, it's not that easy and, as we, as you said, it's like, hey, we're gonna leave an impact. Then giving that torch, as you said, to to the, to your team, to kind of do exactly what your purpose in life do, and my team actually loved this fact that that's what the company was supposed to be and that's where we lost. I'm just gonna say it we, as we, lose track of what we're doing because there is a lot of challenges on the way, but nothing wrong with that. Learn from them, get stronger, get back to it. As long as you know you're going to get back to it, you're good and, uh, I totally at one point forget about it with the challenges. You're going to try and make a living too right, and we get back to it. And here we are Now.

Speaker 1: 2:08

The nice thing and one of the things that I walk around and talk about it and everything and that's actually how we met Mark is just the peer group, the education, the training, the self-improvement. A lot of people feel comfortable and I was like they stuck where they are and they can't just get it to the next level or the one good to great kind of scenario or scale it or basically. And that's why, unfortunately, you see, and specifically here, I think, the number above 70% of small businesses, that's one or two man, show right, or I don't want to be sexist there, but it's just two people working in a company and it's forever, so the owner always working, and basically what you did? You just get yourself a job, you own your job, that's all and nothing wrong with that.

Speaker 2: 3:05

No, it's a lifestyle. No, it's a lifestyle.

Speaker 1: 3:06

Yeah, it's a lifestyle. Some people go for it, some people loves it, and you know what? Not being that person sometimes is actually struggling. So I hear a lot of story about people that they wanted to own their business and want to grow their own business and scale it and have employees. And what have you right? Uh, it's a hurdle, it's there, it's just it hits you at one point and you just kind of like cannot lift your head up and you're stuck and it's it's uh, it's. It's so sad. And one of the fact that actually keep talking about it is having somebody help you, hold your hand through the journey, and there is nothing better than having somebody that actually took your steps and they're ahead of you or in the same boat as you, or even they just started to learn from each other. So when I and that's how we met right Just back to it, the peer groups, I mean joining peer groups I joined a peer group, I think in 2022.

Speaker 1: 4:17

And we were stagnant, like as a business, we didn't grow for years. And just because, wherever I go, I feel I'm the smartest in the room, around all my surroundings, I feel I'm the smartest in the room, and you know, it becomes life. It's just, hey, you're making money, you're making a living, your kids are comfortable, you're doing investments, et cetera. You're good, you're set for life, right. And then it's like, oh, but we're stagnant, we're there, we're not going to move, we're not even adding 1% year over year, and you just think about it like, oh, I don't have a proper education for this specific phase. I'm in, yes, I've done one, two, three and I want to go to five, but I don't know how to do four. And you can't find a segue around it. You got to have to go through it and you need education. So for a long time I quit reading, I quit learning. Of course, on a technical end we're learning technical, but on a business side of things, nothing.

Speaker 1: 5:29

And when I joined that peer group the first peer group I joined, which is, uh, in the same organization. You're in different peer group, yeah, but we're in the same organization. And the 10, 12 peers that I have in my group they're smart, intelligent people. They have a different life story than me or you, and they made it. And you know what. They're smart. Yes, you think you're smart, but they're smart too. And you take all that knowledge from all these different people. Then you started reading books and just kind of self-develop on myself and it's like, oh, I'm on seven, I passed four a long time ago, then you're on 10. And people say, oh, the first million is the hardest thing. And when you hit a million I think Shark Tank it was on Shark Tank it was like, hey, you make the first million, that's the hardest thing.

Speaker 1: 6:31

Then everything is snowballing from there and it's not. The 2 million has a challenge, the 5 million has a challenge. And if you don't read, build processes like. I didn't know how to document all what I do and I sat down and was like, oh, I do this, I shouldn't be doing this, this is taking a lot of my time. This delegate, elevate delegate, this is taking a lot of my time. Let's delegate, elevate delegate.

Speaker 1: 6:56

Whatever the story is, it's like, hey, find the right person in the right seat to do what I do, exactly what you said is like pass that torch. Pass that torch and just keep focus on your why. It's like, hey, we're going to get more kids that don't have a career, don't have education. Teach them, give them a proper job, not a minimum wage, and let them go and thrive, either with our company or any other company, but that's our why. It's like, hey, sometimes it doesn't work and not a culture fit and what have you. But yeah, it's amazing, it's challenging, you get hurt throughout sometimes, but it's just what keeps us on our toes.

Speaker 2: 7:41

You talk about obviously learning, right. So you know, if you're not learning, you're not growing and as a leader, it's our responsibility to learn. It's just face it and, just like talking about business, you can't grow past a certain phase if you've never been there. I've had conversations with CEOs that were still trying to run their $120 million business like a $12 million business. It wasn't working out well. They had to reach outside, outside of their comfort zone right, what they know to bring in some you know different processes and and hire different people to do these things to start operating like 120 million dollar business. Yep, and you know it's. That's just all part of that growth.

Speaker 2: 8:30

And you know, sometimes we we get so stuck in what we're doing we don't realize that we should be doing all these other things because we're not. You know, once again, if you're busy with the day-to-day you know BS or whatever you're dealing with you're not opening your mind to these other things. You're not learning to know that you need to apply these things. You just know that, yeah, maybe you get some inefficiencies or maybe you know you're fighting with these things but don't realize that there's a solution to that If you're to go out and look for that right. Look for that knowledge that then apply it to your business. So you've mentioned I heard you and I'm looking down here to my my notes I heard you mention atomic habits. I heard you mentioned good to great. I heard you mentioned scale it. Um, obviously, we know all these are some very good information, right, and how you? Once again, it's only as good as what you, how you apply it, right. Most recently, you had mentioned the atomic habits. You're reading that now correct yes, right now.

Speaker 2: 9:32

And so far in that. What's that one thing you're pulling out of that that you could see yourself applying tomorrow?

Speaker 1: 9:43

so self-improvement. Yeah, the the funny part is, uh, I always like you see me next year, I'm shred. Then you see me the year after, I'm like, gained a lot of weight. And honestly, yes, I'm very like I try not to be addictive to anything and just figuring out, I was like okay, I'm a food addict, it's a thing, and I got to work around it. It's just how right.

Speaker 2: 10:20

So tell me more about that. What do you say? A food addict? What does that mean? Help me understand.

Speaker 1: 10:25

We're very foodie, so it's like we like to go eat and try food or whatever, although I'm very like I work out as much as I can, but I've never had like that schedule. So the atomic habit habit and the reason why I started that book is just a little bit of a tweak so you can change daily and make it a good habit versus a bad habit, because it's all about habits Like hey, yeah, you know, I eat this chocolate today, I should be fine. Then you eat that chocolate tomorrow and you should be fine. And it's a little bit, a little bit. Then what we do is like one day, oh shoot, I gain a lot of weight. What are you going to do? You diet. One day you step up at the scale and it's like, oh shit, I'm still in that same weight. You're not going to lose weight in one day. Same weight, you're not going to lose weight in one day. You've been building that up over years. Same thing. You don't build success in one day. That's what I said. There's no overnight success, it's just a little bit of a little bit of a little bit. And what you're doing you're just changing and changing and learning better changing your habits, learning, learning, learning and changing the habit of my egos.

Speaker 1: 11:36

I was like, hey, no book can teach me how to run my business. Not even $200 million CEO can teach me how to run my business, because that CEO got lucky, it's at some point and I'm not lucky, or whatever the story is. I'm trying to get my point here, which is no, it's just you gotta figure out what you're doing. It's not gonna work anymore. And every single day you're doing it that becomes a bad habit. Just tweak it. Whatever it is learning.

Speaker 1: 12:17

Learning is essential, like, honestly, our culture unfortunately nowadays is my background is not. There's not not a reading culture. And just to go back to the fact that I can read a book or even listen to a book when I'm in the car, it was just, who's going to teach me what I already know about my business? Like, nobody can teach me. And the first book I've read after 10 years of not reading books, it was a very good book called Traction. I know you read it because I know you touched a little bit on that module and I was like, oh, my god, this guy knows what he's talking about. And then it took. It's like, oh, I should start sitting with Mark and see what he does and how he does it. And then you collectively collect all these ideas and see what all people are doing and you share with all these smart people, because you're not the smartest in the room.

Speaker 2: 13:25

We all know something someone else doesn't that we can share, and that could be an experience, right, that could be a I mean, I want to say a trial and an error, or you know a lesson through a mistake that you made and you came out the other side and you can share that experience. So, yes, we all have knowledge that someone else doesn't, that we have to share, and so, regardless of whether you think you're the smartest guy in the room or not, everyone else in there knows something you don't.