More Profit, More Problems: The Truth About Growing a Business

Most entrepreneurs pray for growth, then complain when the problems show up. In this episode of Success Is Not Convenient, Bernie Gallerani breaks down why problems are not evidence that your business is failing, they're evidence that it's growing. You'll learn why every dollar in your bank account is attached to a problem you solved, why growth exposes broken systems instead of creating them, and how changing your relationship with problems can change your income.

Stop asking for fewer problems. Start becoming the person capable of solving bigger ones.

Transcript

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Hello, everybody. Bernie Gallorani bringing another episode of Success Is Not Convenient. Thank you all for participating and watching these videos. Over a year and a half now, I guess, or about a year and a half, we've been doing this podcast, and uh we've done probably, let's just call it 60 or 70 of these videos. So thank you so much for your uh participation, all of your great thumbs up, and all your opportunities to follow us. And so please, please hit the like button on there, hit the subscribe button. We'd love to continue to keep bringing these. What I've thought about a little bit, Riley actually was stimulated from a really good friend of mine. Solving more problems should mean that you're making more money. And I'll never forget the relationship or the conversation maybe I had with a friend of mine when we were dealing with I was dealing with an issue. And I love what he said. And he said, you know, that's actually what you get paid for, is to solve problems. And I thought, man, what a really great comment if you're dealing with things that are stressing you out sometimes, or you're dealing with just growth issues and problems occur. That's why you're the business owner and you're the entrepreneur, is because problems are always gonna show up inside of your business. If your business is growing, that means your problems are growing. And if your problems are growing and you solve those problems, then you solve that problem, you get to make that growth, and also obviously the income that comes off of that. Solving more problems should mean that you're making more money. That's what it should mean. And so that's what we're gonna focus on a little bit today. Have you ever noticed that most entrepreneurs have the wrong relationship with problems? And you always hear them complain about the problems that they're having. Oh, it's so frustrating. And but but that's the good part. And if you look at it just a little bit different, sometimes when you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change. And a lot of these entrepreneurs, they pray for growth, they ask for more customers, they dream about actually doubling their business and doubling their income. And then what happens? Problems show up. Sales start to increase, the team grows more in clients, the phone rings more often, which is a good thing. And almost immediately they start saying to themselves, this business is getting too stressful for me. Can anybody relate to that? There are just too many problems that are happening. Maybe we've just grown too fast. That might be something that they say to themselves is maybe we just grow, we're growing faster than we probably know how to do. And I and I would highly encourage you, if your business is growing really fast, to keep up with that momentum. But that also means that you're gonna be solving lots of problems faster. I love the saying it says fail faster, fail, fail, fail faster. The faster you fail, the more you grow. The more problems you have to solve, the faster your business grows. So we just have to change our relationship to the word problem. Problem means growth. That's an exciting thing for you and your business. Problem means you get to solve something so you can correct that so it doesn't happen again. So you get stretched to a point where problems start to show up. And it's really your relationship with the word problem. The very thing that they prayed for becomes the thing that they actually complain about. Here's what I want to challenge everybody today. Problems are not evidence of your business failing. Problems are evidence of your business growing. And if your business is growing and you aren't encountering new problems, then you're probably not growing at all. So if you're a person who likes to go to work and everything be smooth, you're probably actually your business is probably moving backwards. If you have problems, that means you're growing and stretching. You have to solve those in order to go to the next level. The goal of entrepreneurship isn't to eliminate the problems. The goal is to become the kind of leader who can solve increasingly valuable problems all the time. Every dollar is attached to a problem. I want you guys to write that down. Every time you make a paycheck, a good paycheck, right? Like, oh, this was a really great month. I'll bet you you had a lot of things to solve that month. I bet you had a lot of issues. And if you're solving issues right now, maybe 60, 90 days, all of that opportunity for that income is going to show up. Every dollar is attached to some level of a problem. And I don't care what business you're in, every dollar that enters your bank account arrives there because someone had a problem that you solved. Customers don't pay you because you're a nice person. They pay you because you work hard for them. They pay because they believe that you'll remove the pain and reduce the uncertainty and save them time, make them money, and even improve the quality of their life. Think about every successful company that you've ever had a chance to vision or see. Amazon solved a convenience problem. They just solved a problem. FedEx solved a speed problem. Apple solved a complexity issue. Tesla challenged transportation and how that was going to be delivered. Your business exists for only one reason to solve problems better than your competitors are. I want to recommend and encourage every one of you guys that if you're going to get away from problems, you're dying. If you have problems to solve, you're growing. Let's just change our mindset on it. So why are we surprised when problems show up inside of our own companies? Doesn't make any sense. This is actually why we're in business. If we didn't have solved problems, anybody could do it. Growth doesn't create problems, it reveals the problems. Listen to this again. When you're growing, it's stretching. It's like breaking the old self or the old system, and it's creating problems. And what it does is when you grow the business, it actually shows the problems that you already have. You just don't see them until you stretch it. So that's a good thing because you get to solve that. We're dealing with that right now in our growth process of all the issues that we're trying to solve. And you don't even realize what you have until you try to test the system. And this is where I think entrepreneurs misunderstand scaling altogether. Growth doesn't create broken systems. Growth exposes broken systems. It exposes them. They're already there. They just make them more apparent. So when you're selling 10 products, almost anything works because you're not selling a lot. But when you're selling 100 products, you start seeing cracks. When you're selling 1,000 products every week, this gets exposed. And your hiring process gets tested. Your people become more important. The systems become more important. The process of how you do things becomes more important. Your leadership gets tested. That's your will. You're like, oh my gosh, this is this is driving me crazy. It's just testing your will. And that's part of growth. Your communication gets tested all the time, and your systems get tested constantly. Your finances get tested. Boy, you ever exceed the stress on the financial side of growth. But that's the good thing about growth is it gets to test you and make you a better person, a better entrepreneur. Growth is pressure constantly, and pressure reveals what's already there for you. Just like squeezing an orange doesn't create orange juice, it reveals what's inside. Let's say this again: if you're squeezing an orange, it doesn't create orange juice. It's just revealing what's inside the orange. Business growth squeezes your organization, and whatever comes out of it was already there. That's like the aha moment. It was already lingering within your business, but you didn't see it because you never tested it. And right now, I'll give you guys an example. We're testing things to such a level right now. Gosh, we've come to realize that there's so many things that we have to change in order to scale. But we would have never identified those things had we not tested, pressure tested it. See, most entrepreneurs retreat at the first sign of any sort of resistance. And this is where companies stop growing. They mistake resistance for failure. Instead of saying, we found something to improve, what people really say is this isn't really working for me. And they start retreating, they start going backwards because it gets a little hard and difficult. And they stop hiring people and they stop like marketing and they stop investing in themselves into other people and they stop just taking risks altogether. Why do they do that? Because they believe success was supposed to become easier, and it's actually the opposite of that. Don't ask for it to be easier. Actually ask for it to be harder. The better your business becomes, the more sophisticated your problems become. But you're not being punished, you're actually being promoted. Let's think about that. We think our day, oh my God, it was such a tough day today. No, you're growing, you're learning, you're experiencing things that you normally don't experience. That's called growth. Embrace change, embrace failure, embrace growth. You cannot have success without failure. It's just not designed that way. Here's a mind shift shift that changed the way I think about all entrepreneurship. Every new level of business comes with a new level of responsibility. And every responsibility always introduces bigger problems. Always. Why don't you think about this? A company doing $500,000 a year has one set of problems. And a company doing $5 million a year has another set of problems. Think about this. A company doing 50 million has a whole different set of problems. Nobody escapes problems, but with problems, the more you have, the more issues you have to solve. Typically, the more money you make. That's a good thing. So if you want to make more money, solve more problems, have more problems, ask for growth problems. The only thing that changes is the value of the problems that they're solving. That's it. The CEO of a billion-dollar company doesn't wake up problem-free. They wake up solving problems worth billions. And that's why they're paid what they're paid. That's how they make their money. I don't know if you guys know who Doug McMillan is, but he's the CEO of Walmart, the largest retail store in the world. Do you think he solves problems all day? Yes. And that's why he gets paid. Doug runs a $713 billion per year business. Each Walmart store in the United States brings in over $1 million every day. Now let's, this is the good part. Doug solves problems all day, I think you guys would agree. But Doug also earns $27 million a year. Do you think he has to solve problems all day? Yes. And he doesn't mind with a $27 million salary, he is happy solving those problems. See, the marketplace rewards problem solvers. The marketplace doesn't reward effort. It's not the effort, it's the solving the problems. Put yourself in the middle of problems and you'll make more money. It rewards all the solutions that you come up with. You don't become wealthy because you worked harder. You become wealthy because you solve problems other people couldn't solve. That's why entrepreneurs make more than employees. Not because they work more hours, but because they accept more uncertainty. See, that's the biggest false of all, the certainty. They go to work for certainty, so they don't have to solve problems because they don't like the pain, while the entrepreneur opens the door, pays the salary, and solves problems and makes the money. And then people are like, well, that person makes so much money, it's because they solve the problems. More responsibility is more decision making and more pressure and more problems. Your paycheck is tied directly to the weight you're willing to carry. What is that level of responsibility you're willing to take on? No one's blaming you if you don't want to grow your company, but don't complain about your paycheck. Business is a never-ending stress test constantly. I get people all the time going, I got Bernie, I mean, how do you deal with all these four companies that you're running? It's like it's a lot of work, but guess what? I have four. I actually have heard of people having 120 companies they're running. Can you imagine those problems? I'd love to get there. I'm just trying to figure out how to handle four. I love thinking about business this way. Every time you grow, your company takes another stress test. Can your customer service handle it? Are you prepared for that? Can your systems handle the changes in the stress? Can your culture handle it? Maybe not now, but you can develop it. Can your leadership handle the level of stress or problem solving? Can you take that on? Are you willing to take that on? Some people are some people I get responses from like, my God, I mean, running a business is exhausting. Maybe. But see, what happens is when you stretch and you grow, every weakness gets exposed. And that's not bad. That's valuable because every weakness you identify is another opportunity to improve your business. We're all about growing here. Stop asking for it to be easier. Your business shouldn't be easier. I hear entrepreneurs say all the time, I just want things to calm down. Really? I don't think you really do. Because if things calm down, usually your growth has stopped. Instead, I want you to look at it like this: start asking for wisdom. Ask for perspective. Ask for just better leadership, you and the people around you. Ask for better decision making. Don't ask for fewer problems, but ask to become the person capable of solving the bigger issues. Your relationship with problems determine your income. Think about two business owners. First sees problems as interruptions. Every issue ruins their day. Every complaint frustrates them. Every employee mistake makes them emotional. God, I know many people like that. The second entrepreneur sees the exact same problem differently. And what they think is, well, this is interesting. What is this teaching me right now? What am I going to learn from this? What systems are broke that I need to make repairs? What process needs to improve? What lesson is hiding inside of this problem? I love that question. It's like, what lessons should I be learning from the issues that I'm having? Same problems, just different mindset. What's your mindset like? It's completely different outcome from the two different people that look at the things the way they look at things. One becomes very wealthy and the other one shuts their business down because they can't handle the problems. One retreats and one just grows. Which one are you going to be? Problems are like tuition. It's your education. This is one of the greatest lessons that I've learned. Problems are expensive, but ignorance is even more expensive. And every mistake teaches something. Every failure exposes something. Every difficult employee teaches us leadership issues. Every unhappy customer teaches us how to provide better service. Every cash flow teaches us discipline with our money. Every problem is a tuition. It's what we have to pay in order to figure it out. The question is: did you learn the lesson? Are you willing to learn the lesson? Because if you don't, you'll pay for that class again and again and again and again. The best leaders become professional problem solvers. When I walk into my business, I'm not looking for confirmation that everything is perfect. I'm actually looking for friction. Yes. I'm gonna when I walk in this building every day, I'm like, I'm gonna solve problems today. When a problem hits my desk, it's like, bring it on. This is what my job is. This is what our job is. Solving problems. Make more money, solve more problems. Get more problems, make more money. That's typically how it's supposed to work. Where are you losing money? Where are customers getting frustrated? Where are agents struggling right now in your organization? I'm in real estate, so where are my agents struggling? Where are systems breaking all the time, by the way, every day? I got a huge one right now I'm dealing with that is very frustrating, but I gotta solve the problem. That's my job. Where is communication failing in your organization? Because every problem I solve today creates capacity for tomorrow's growth. Problems are opportunities wearing work clothes. I want to leave you with one thought. Stop measuring success by how few problems you have. Instead, I want you to look at it like this: measure your success by the quality of the problems that you're capable of solving. Because that is what entrepreneurship really is. Not avoiding problems, not eliminating stress, not hoping everything runs perfectly. Entrepreneurship is becoming the kind of leader who gets excited when new challenges appear. Because you know that on the other side of solving is a stronger business, a stronger team, and a stronger version of you. That's the goal. So the next time your business feels a little bit heavy, don't ask this question, why is this happening to me? Ask this question What is the problem preparing me for right now? Because every problem you solve expands your capacity. That's the growth. Every improvement creates momentum, and every obstacle you overcome makes your business more valuable. And here's the truth: I hope you never forget the business that makes the most money aren't the ones with the fewest problems. They are the ones that have been led by people who have become exceptional at solving all the problems. So don't run from the problems. Welcome them, study them, solve the problem because your next level of income is hidden inside the problems that you're willing to face today. Guys, thank you so much for allowing me to spend some time with you today. Please hit that like button, that subscribe button. We'd love to continue to keep bringing all these things to you. We're gonna keep bringing them anyway. But thank you, thank you for the time that you're spending. I hope everybody has a great day.