The Entrepreneur’s Calling...

Welcome to today's episode, I have had a great weekend, my wife has been away.

But that's not why I have had a great weekend.

That may be a little bit awkward to say.

But anyway, no, my wife saw on a way back she's had an awesome time up in New sir did a 30k word walk for charity, they raised over $4,000 from a lunch last Friday.

And then this weekend, they've been up a nurse who did the walk.

massages, I think has been a great time looking forward to her coming back.

Just had a working be 15 minutes with my kids were like, Okay, let's get this house operational, get it looking good.

All four of us went on to a 15-minute power clean house is looking good.

I'm feeling so I'm feeling really happy.

I'm running into a couple of problems we're behind on the laundry.

And for whatever reason, my dryer is meant to handle seven kilos.

It is not handling seven kilos.

It's just spinning.

And I'm like, man, it doesn't seem like I bought it that long ago.

So I just want to be aware of not delaying the fix on that.

Because if it goes out of warranty, then it won't be fixable on the warranty.

And I'm like Oh man, that needs to be brought to attention.

What has happened over this time to make me feel particularly happy is that I've just completed warrior will boot camp.

And we discussed that at length yesterday.

And what is interesting, I've just been refining again, like this idea of iterating like going back and improving and improving.

And really the interesting thing was describing what is the problem that entrepreneurs face when they need systems.

And the idea that I just came up with was that their business no longer works.

So up until the point where they start to run into unusual problems that are quite difficult to solve, or even recognize what's the cause.

Up until that point, they may have had a smaller number of teams maybe three, four, or five people.

And perhaps their revenue streams, maybe up to a million, maybe 2 million.

And they're getting along, okay.

But as they start to grow through those types of numbers, for whatever reason.

And we'll come back to that things start to not work.

And so this idea of businesses not working anymore, and suddenly the excitement, the joy that comes from a startup from going from nothing through to get up to these levels, suddenly becomes very frustrating, like pretty difficult to solve.

Why is that? Well, you got to realize that they're busy, you're busy, you're running through a lot of problems.

Because as you start to grow through these numbers, what happens is this does to be fire, after fire after fire and essentially find yourself in constant crisis mode.

You're having to manage your people, they don't seem to be working well, they've seemed to have become really dumb, which might sound a bit harsh, but they're like, We don't how do I do this, they come to you continually asking for how to do it.

You're now chief troubleshooter, as well as meant to be guiding the business where we're going, but that you don't have any time for that.

Like there are no ties, like where did all my time go? Because basically, from nine to five, you're putting out fires, who you're helping your team put out fires, this takes you away from being able to do any work.

And it's really interesting.

So I finished warrior wealth.

And I jumped into this book called the Phoenix Project written in 2015.

And it's about a company with IT problems.

But it reads very similarly to an entrepreneur with problems.

And it's going through me oh, well look at this.

They're identifying what's going on.

The analogy that they give is that the IT problem works to the same problems that a badly run Factory will run into.

So they've got this kind of model of like, how do we not have bottlenecks? How do we identify the constraining factor in our production line? How do we protect that? How do we make sure that the flow true comes up that we don't backlog everything, and, this is a fascinating problem because it is probably what's going on in your business?

If you're seeing unfinished work everywhere, then this means that something's broken.

But it's not an easy solution, because the temptation is just to continually fix the problem.

Fix the problem here, fix the problem here, fix the problem here.

And so getting that big viewpoint to come up and go Why are we having so many problems? And this book, the Phoenix Project wrote about an IT department in a large company, you know, do I think there They're meant to be doing 4 billion.

It's a fictional story.

It's great.

I'm loving it, like, I'm super addicted to this book and whether I'm just coming off the intensity of very well Bootcamp or for whatever reason, it's just speaking to me, it's really interesting to see this evolution of the IT department working out that how does work get done.

And the cost of not managing work, not even knowing how work gets approved, how, how it gets done, recognizing where the blockages are the bottlenecks, none of this can be seen.

And slowly they're working through the book.

So I’ve not finished it, but it really is an interesting exploration of how things need to be seen, like optics.

Optics is really the story where He begins to see how much work is actually done, how many projects are being taken on? How do they get approved for the inability to say no, because they don't even know how much work is in the system?

And this, this is really very similar to you like if you are struggling, then it could well be that you have no optics on how much work there is.

So you don't know whether to hire, you don't know whether you've got a team problem, or you've got a process problem, or you've got a marketing problem, or what word counting prop like there are just problems everywhere.

And this comes through to how to think like this is a thinking problem.

And the interesting thing about businesses, it's like this trap, it's like a business can be run without any of this stuff up until the levels where you start to hit these problems where there are enough people.

And there's enough revenue, and there are enough customers to actually require systems up until that point, you don't need it.

You can duct tape it, you can throw it together, you can just problem solve on the go, you know, there's not enough benefit to actually documenting how you do things.

But the interesting thing is that those who have been burned before know they're like, yeah, yeah, when we hit that level, it was disastrous, because they had no time to try and work out what the problem was, they couldn't see the problem is just like, it couldn't work out, the solution couldn't work out the problem.

And why is that? Well, the interesting thing is that the systems are under every part of your business, they're under marketing.

They're under sales, they're under advertising, they're under fulfillment, they're under optics, they're under people, they're under accounting, they're under your tax game, they're under your cash that you take the profitability that you extract out there under your insurance game, under your legal game, all of these things are being run by your systems.

Let me say that, again, all of these things are being run by your systems.

Now your people are running the systems.

You know, they go and do the work of those systems.

But when your systems are patchy, incomplete, disorganized, you will have fires.

It is a necessary outcome of having poor systems.

But it doesn't appear until you're good enough to actually hit these levels.

So it's this beautiful trap.

It's like, Yeah, we're going to let you get away with it.

But when you hit that point, and things start to become chaotic, and things start to become firefighting, and suddenly, you've got no time anymore.

And this has you working a second day, you basically finish sorting out everyone's problems.

And then you're like, oh, man, what about my work as the entrepreneur as the business owner, so you end up working from five, through to seven to eight, to nine to 11 to midnight, you might make at home, you kind of stressed out and frustrated, have a fight with your wife, she's pissed off.

Your kids are like, man, you're so grumpy, grumpy dad.

They don't want to know about you.

You work Saturday morning.

So you missed the game.

You're not looking after yourself.

You're exhausted.

So you're sleeping, you're having coffee, having stimulants to get through the day, and then at night stressed out of your brain.

So you begin alcohol.

And you have one, I'm going to tell myself, I'm just going to have one beer, but it's two and then a two-wheeler.

Okay, one more, and then I'm stopping but three, and, okay, man, I'm feeling better.

I'm feeling better.

I'm going to have one more four.

And suddenly you're at six.

And then your wife is like, man, you're drinking too much.

You're getting a bit overweight.

You look at yourself in the mirror and you've got a guard.

puffing going up the stairs, like even getting up basic.

basic movements in your body and it's like, man, your team look at you and go, what's gone? What's up with this guy, they're starting to worry, you know, because they sense the difficulties and the stress and the strain that you're under, and the effect that it has on your ability to think and to problem solver and to lead.

And this is exactly the time that you need to do this.

But unless you recognize that systems are creating your results, and until you go, you know what I must solve this systems problem, then you will continue to have to put in so much effort to solve fire after fire, manage your people, and it's not going to get better like you're going to hit a plateau as the chaos of your business hits into your production and like those two are fighting, and suddenly you'll end up with a plateau and you won't grow anymore.

It's just not possible.

Like, maybe you could pull a superhuman effort for a while, maybe months, maybe a couple of years.

But eventually, the cost the way, the difficulty of this is, you end up burning it to the ground.

Mistakes, may tax is not accounted for cash flow goes out the window.

And you might think, man, is there a better option than this? Perhaps there's something else perhaps there's a different way because I want you to know that if you had your systems on point, and you knew that systems created results, consistently executed systems create consistent results across the board.

And then if you could just get that one piece in place, and suddenly your team begins to operate from documented systems.

And they've got the instructions on how to do things.

And so you can look and say, Well, hey, did you do that? Okay, if that got done, and we've got a result that we didn't want, then either you didn't do it right, or we need to change this document to make sure that gives us the result that we want.

You've actually got the capacity to go hey, look, I can see how we went from A to D, A, B, C, D, except you've got a B, F G and you're like oh man, okay, no wonder we didn't get D we went to f here.

Let's change that.

Let's make it see if this is something that you want to get on point.

My wife's just arrived.

I'm going to finish up here.

Head over to systemio.dev you have an awesome day.

I hope you got value out of this and I'll see you tomorrow for the next episode as we continue to explore the power of systems to create results in business.

See you then.