You Can't Have Five Priorities, Only One

0:00I'm Carter Cofield. We sell tax and financial services to high income entrepreneurs. We do about $9 million of revenue. Like to be at $25 million by the end of this year. Um what's stopping us? So, I I know what the constraint is. Um people we need more advisors to service our clients. We need a faster onboarding process to do more 5-day virtual events. Got that. Um I don't think it takes the whole company to fix that constraint. I think it's HR, CSMs, operations. Is it okay to have um the rest of the company focus on a different constraint or would that like kill team morale? How do you balance constraints across fixing constraints across departments?

0:36>> That's a really good question. Um >> [sighs] >> I've gone back and forth on this, so maybe there isn't a right answer. But I would say that in the season that I'm currently in, I believe that there is one constraint and if we solve that constraint, the business will grow. And so I want everybody to know that this is what we're working on. And what ends up happening is that you see the other fires that are burning and then that actually creates more urgency to fix the first one.

1:02When you try and fix them in parallel, it ends up taking longer to do both than to do one and then the other because the whole team knows. It's like, "But there's this other fire burning." You're like, "Right, then fix the [ __ ] first one." Um and so then it just orients the whole team. Right, and then also that means that like if something has to happen, the whole team is greasing the, you know, the the tracks to make sure that this objective gets pushed forward even because there's so many supporting and ancillary things to get some big thing done that if they're like, "Well, we have our priority." It's like I think that's what gets in the way.

1:31>> "Well, sales has this priority but operations like this is not a priority for us right now." >> So we call it the the silent six, which is basically like every business has their priorities for the year or whatever. The silent six one is that we af- we have to keep selling. We have to keep doing business, right? So those things always have to continue. But like what is the one thing that matters most? Like um I think it's Jack Stackleman. Um he's a he's a good book on this. Um but I'll give you the T tell the other the is that he was a big believer or is a big believer in not having three objectives or five objectives, but just one. He said, "Basically, if you can't get clear that one thing is more important than everything, then that's your fault as an entrepreneur."

2:08And so I see like if we're the chief allocators of resources, then it means we have to be able to prioritize. And if we can't do it, how can we expect our teams to? Which means we have to be able to say, "This is more important than that." And yes, they are both important, but this one is more important. And I think that that kind of betting perspective has served me really well. Being very violent with like, "This is the most important." And I've just noticed that things get done way faster because then it's like, "Hey, when we do this, then we can do this next thing." And then everyone wants to do the next thing, too. And then when we do the next thing, all we move we know we part the seas to get that done.

2:39>> I like that. Thank you. >> Yeah. It also in um in service of what I was talking about earlier, when you have that perspective, it also minimizes all the other changes that you're making across the company, too. Because you're like, "That's not a priority. Could we improve this thing? Probably. Do we need to right now? No." It's not the constraint. If you like this video and you're a business owner who wants to break through your current revenue ceiling, I distilled every lesson from scaling 10 businesses past 10 million and three businesses past 100 million into a completely free scaling road map that I've used to go from zero to one, zero to 10, and zero to 100 plus. And so you can click here and you can check it out.

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