"Just Trust Your Gut" And More Business Lessons I Needed To Unlearn Ep 010

Discover the unconventional wisdom that led me from the realm of low six-figures to the heights of seven-figures and beyond. In this episode of Brightside Business, you'll learn why delegation is not just a luxury but a necessity for scaling your enterprise. We dissect the importance of methodical leadership over flashy personas, drawing powerful insights from the "Good to Great" study by Jim Collins. Plus, we uncover the pitfalls of relying solely on intuition, and why a data-driven approach is crucial for sustainable growth.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Lessons for Scaling a Business
• 11:38 Free Business Consultation for Scaling

Transcript

Joey Young: 0:00

Welcome to Breadside Business, where I talk to online entrepreneurs like yourself about how to grow your business to seven figures and beyond. My name's Joey Young. I grew my family's professional services business to $100,000 a month in two years and I learned a lot along the way. One of them is the difference between how a five-figure solopreneur approaches their business versus a seven-figure business owner, and that's what I want to unpack today. Same 24 hours. What's the difference? Because the results are different, huge, hugely different between those two types of business owners and specifically I boiled it down to four lessons that I had to unlearn to be able to grow to these $100,000 months, and hopefully this will be helpful for you.

Joey Young: 0:44

The first thing I had to unlearn as I scaled is that I can do blank better than anyone else. Insert business task, responsibility, role of the business. This was a huge limiting belief for me. I thought that I could do everything in the business better than anyone and the idea I mean. The thing is sure, if you're a tiny business and just three people and you're just trying to get things done and scrap and scrape and make things happen, you're wearing a lot of hats, so you're not really focused on expertise. But once you get to the level where you're making some money but you want to scale higher, you have to start loving and celebrating delegation, not despising it. And a lot of people struggle with this because they're like well, how do I maintain quality and how do I make sure that you know, how do I let go of things and make sure that they're doing really well, even when I'm not overseeing them?

Joey Young: 1:37

Well, it all comes down to your weekly one-to-ones. If you delegate something to someone, make sure you're meeting with them weekly. It doesn't have to be long and you're going to talk about two things. You're going to talk about your metrics and you're going to look at their affect during that meeting and you're going to ask them about their situation and how things are going. Metrics are important because obviously those are cut and dry numbers. Those are their KPIs how is their area of the business going? And number two, their affect. You're going to ask them how they're doing, how their team is doing, how they feel this time of year is versus this time of year last year, and you're going to watch and you're going to meet with them week by week and look at how they answer that question differently. And you can tell a lot by the tone and reading in between the lines and the interpersonal side of how your team leader or some person in your business who reports to you how they talk about their area of their business, in combination with the metrics, to know how they're doing and that's how you just completely let an area of the business be controlled by someone else is by doing those two things during weekly meetings, and you know this also is important to think about the idea that you can identify and place people in specific roles.

Joey Young: 2:50

So one thing that you don't need when you're a solopreneur is the ability to understand and to move people into certain roles that will help them flourish. But as you scale, you will need the skill of learning what people are good at and then helping them to leverage that strength inside your business. For example, let's say you got Jim over here and Jim is causing half of the issues on your admin team and he's stressing everyone out. But Jim is super friendly and he's a big team player and he's trying really, really hard. He's not lazy, he's not slacking. So you're like what do we do? Well, how about we try moving Jim to the customer support team? Jim spends half his day worrying what other people think about him and supporting his teammates that he doesn't get his own work done and he makes mistakes. So that's an example of identifying someone who has a skill set and putting them on the right seat on the bus. And, wouldn't you know it, jim will probably flourish in that new role.

Joey Young: 3:50

So that's the first lesson I had to unlearn. The second one is I thought big personalities led big businesses and this is just not true. I got to tell you from introvert to introvert if you're an introvert watching this there is a disproportionate amount of bravado we see on social media these days from CEOs, because those are the clips and the personalities that rise to the top. But the reality is, if you look at the good to great study, which ultimately led to the book Good to Great by Jim Collins, he talks about level five leaders in that book that completely turned their companies around and led to sustained like 10 plus year, year over year growth beating the S&P 500. And these level five leaders were not bombastic, they were not huge personalities. They usually were quiet, methodical, thoughtful people and they went on to grow some of the hugest businesses you've ever. You know, you've heard of they're family names. And the reality is, when the smoke clears after a hurricane, it's the trees with the deepest roots that are standing, no matter how tall they are.

Joey Young: 4:58

So that's why it's important to think about, you know, getting a little bit more girth and a little bit more depth to your leadership and not worrying about the outside. I used to. You know I read the book a long time ago. This is such a waste of time. It was called the charisma myth. I don't know why I read it. No one cares. You know your team. They don't care if you're funny in meetings. They want to be respected and they want to be part of a team that works on making a dent in the universe, making and doing something meaningful with their day. They don't care if you're witty or not. You know. Number three follow your gut. This was a huge lesson I had to unlearn when I started my business journey because, honestly, there was no worse question you could have asked Joey at the beginning of my business scaling journey than what does your intuition tell you, joey? What does your gut tell you we need to do in this situation? That would have been horrible, and it's because I wasn't an expert.

Joey Young: 5:54

Yet Psychologists say experts are people who have spent enough time with a certain subject, with a certain discipline, to build a mental model so they have a response or a toolkit to certain problems or certain opportunities. So, like a scientist would have a mental model of how the atom works or how it forms, a soccer coach would have a mental model for how to position their players to win the World Cup. You know, maybe a business person might have a mental model for successfully launching, position their players to win the World Cup. Maybe a business person might have a mental model for successfully launching a new product. These are what experts are.

Joey Young: 6:28

Novices are not experts, and I spent a lot of time in the beginning thinking I was an expert and I wish I didn't spend so much time thinking about should I follow my gut on this, my intuition, because honestly, I had no idea what I was doing. Instead, I wish I had built more confidence through my scaling journey in my ability to learn, because what I realized is the faster I move from a state of helplessness and just trying to grasp it, feeling right in a situation, to a state of curiosity and learning, the faster I moved, the faster I dealt with real problems and my business grew, and so the same can be for you. If you're feeling like you have to know the answer to questions, have to be the smartest person in the room. You've got to follow your intuition on things. That is blocking your ability to learn quickly and you might actually, by trying to stay confident, be actually putting yourself in a state of more helplessness because you're closing yourself off to learning and therefore creative problem solving and therefore growing and scaling your business.

Joey Young: 7:37

Number four, lesson final one I thought scaling required that I take my business personally. I saw people who would get super pissed about the small things. I read about Steve Jobs and how personally he would take the computers that he built and how he just focused on the minute details and I thought that was the only way to build a business. But what I realized is that it's, in reality, small minds are the ones that take every win and every loss in their business. Personally, when I was early in my sales journey, every no was a personal attack on me from a client, a potential client. Every yes was a huge victory and meant I was a paragon of sales. I thought it was awesome and I was over the moon, and my emotions would rise and fall a lot on my sales, conversion ability and the performance of the business.

Joey Young: 8:36

But what I understand now is that the really successful business owners do not take their business personally. They look at their business as a machine to be tweaked and to improved. They look at it more like a science fair project than an extension of their identity. You know, it's a fun problem solving game right, and a couple of skills that they develop to not take their business so personally are analyzing and prioritizing problems and opportunities in an objective way. This it seems kind of simple, but the ability to analyze and to prioritize problems and opportunities. For example, if there's a, there's a problem in your business and you're like super pissed about it maybe it's an IT thing and you know you go off for half a day trying to fix this thing. That just is pissing you off and you're like we're not a business that has this type of issues. And then you spend, you know, so much time fixing it and you realize it really all came back down to the fact that you brought a stupid printer brand or something like that and you just wasted all that time on something that someone else could have fixed. And that's when you obsess over the wrong problems and you don't analyze them and you don't prioritize them.

Joey Young: 9:53

Conversely, an opportunity. There's very similar amounts of time spent building a five-figure versus a six-figure marketing campaign. You just got to know which one to spend your energy and your time on. Are you building a five-figure solopreneur business or are you building a seven-figure business that's going to scale? Where are you going to spend your time leveraging your energy and your intellect on? So, between those two things, right, are you going to prioritize the bigger opportunity or going to prioritize the smaller ones?

Joey Young: 10:18

The other strategy and skill that people have to develop to distance themselves from their business is breaking things that aren't broken. You know they talk about this idea of an old couch in a business where it's this old, dirty, like threadbare couch sitting in the proverbial lobby of your business and everyone else from the outside sees it, and even the team sees it, but the business owner. It's a huge blind spot. But that's an old couch that they love and so they have to keep it around and it's so personal no one can touch that couch. It's like, no, that's got to be where it's got to be. But to grow and to scale, you need to break things that aren't broken. You need to grab your couch and fling it out the window, because it's the thing that's holding your business back, like a doctor who has to re-break a bone that's not growing and healing properly. You need to break things that aren't broken in your business so you can build them back better.

Joey Young: 11:12

If this stuff is helping you, if these lessons that I had to unlearn are helping you to unlearn some stuff, I would love to hear your feedback. Shoot me an email, joey at joeyhyoungcom, or shoot me a DM on Instagram. Joeyhyoung is my handle at joey Young and Instagram. I'd love to hear your thoughts or hear your questions so I can maybe talk about some upcoming. You know, in some upcoming episodes I can talk about your questions or your thoughts here on the show.

Joey Young: 11:38

And hey, if you want a free 20 minute consultation on your business to help you break through the next barrier between you and scaling, go to the link in my bio on Instagram. It'll help you to click that link and find a time to meet and we can just talk about your business and hopefully break through the barrier that you're facing right now. That's totally free and don't forget to like and subscribe to this video, leave a five star review. Follow the show. Wherever you're listening to it, you're watching it. If you're this far in, it must have helped you. So the way you say thanks is with a good review, a thumbs up. Really appreciate it. And hey, until next time, my friend, get out there, scale your business, have a lot of fun. I'll see you in the next episode.