Du bist der größte Engpass in deinem Business

0:00Now, one of the most common limiting beliefs entrepreneurs have is that no one can do it as good as they can. But this eventually creates something called keyman risk. And this is the next business principle that I use. And so, fundamentally, every business, if it's relying on any person, whether it's the entrepreneur or otherwise, it's that person is going to be keyman. Now, this is a double-edged sword because the better you get at something, the more keyman you are. And so, the more you've invested in yourself, in some ways, you become a liability for the business as much as you are an asset. But this applies across the board. And so the only real way to pay this down, I'll explain in this little clip.

0:30>> So one of the big issues that especially like when you're coming up, the problem is that everyone here, we like we had to learn all these different things, right? We had to learn marketing, we had to learn sales, we learned product, we learned hiring, we had to learn all this different stuff, right? And then we we want to hire one person who's lived our entire lives and then expect them to work for us for a fraction of what we pay ourselves and are barely even willing to keep doing what we're doing. >> Right. >> One of those. >> Yeah. So we have to break it into parts.

0:57And so I give the analogy of the unicorn, right? So like you're a unicorn in your business, you looking for unicorns is probably not a productive activity. But if you wanted to create something that was an approximation of a unicorn, it's like, okay, well, I need the horn. So I can go find a rhinoceros and I'll I'll get the horn part. And then uh but that body is not going to work. So I got to go get a horse. It's going to be a white horse. It's not going to have a horn. Well, fine. I can get the horse. But then what about the magic pixie dust? Right? So then I got to go my fireflies and I can add those on. on. And so I just bolt on the horn of the rhinoceros onto the horse and get some fireflies. Is it as good as you?

1:30No. But it'll be pretty good. And so if the business requires somebody who's as good as you to run, then the model doesn't work. If the business can work with somebody who's half as good as you, then you're always going to sacrifice some margin in order to scale. >> And so I'll say this differently. One of the terms I use is scale zero. And so the goal is like how can I get so let's say that let's say hypothetical math if I do something I make $20 million a year and it's 50% margins and I'm heavily involved in a whole bunch of [ __ ] right if I hire truly all the people that I need maybe my margin goes from 10 million to four let's just being extreme here but I do nothing now but now that company can then go from 20 to 40 and I can make eight on 40 and it requires zero of me. And so again, it's this a lot of times we have our ego tied to because you said it, you're like, I got to this and as soon you're like and then as soon as I'm there, there's this like and so it's because you have this tie for whatever reason that like if it's not this number, you suck or whatever that is for you. And so we need to be able to give up some of that profit in order to break your your the activities that you currently do into component parts. The activity of doing that is we do time studies. So you look at what you do in a current week and then you start parsing out. Okay, you could take the entire time study, plug it into GPT, and just say, "Hey, what roles uh if I were to replace 100% of these activities, what are this is the smallest amount of roles that could replace all of them?"

2:58And give me the job description and names for those. And it's like, okay, well, actually, you do things. You do some HR [ __ ] and you do some uh marketing stuff and then you do some sales [ __ ] Okay, great. So, you need one of these, one of these, and one of these. And it's like, cool. How much is that going to eat in my margin? I'm going to cut half my margin away. Okay, am I willing to do that so I can actually have something that works? And the first time you hire them, two out of the three will suck because you don't have pattern recognition. And then one of them will be okay. And then you'll hire again and it'll take you 6 months to figure that out. And like, but that thing is is that once you get there though, you will finally be able to get to 500 or million a month or whatever the next stopping point is. And then you'll be like, "Fuck, I don't know how to hire this next person." And then you'll fail for a while and then you'll get it.

3:36>> You just can't stop. You can't stop trying. >> Just look at what you do. >> Like what do you spend your time actually doing? what you think about all that stuff doesn't really matter. All that matters is like I communicate these people in these ways. I make these decisions. So fundamentally you're most of the time you're going to be making decisions or you're going to be doing some sort of individual contributor activity. Those are going to be the core elements of what you do, right? If you want ideating then maybe that's going to come here and then we make a decision about it, right? But most small businesses don't need more ideas. They need more execution. And so we just have to break what you do day-to-day to the buckets, the constituent parts of what they are and just take all the mysticism out of it of like visionary and the energy and whatever. It's just like you do this stuff, this stuff makes money.

4:19We need other people to do that …