Build a Business, Not a Job

So I’m working on this script right now for an upcoming YouTube video. It’s all about how I live a very boring life, kind of by intention, also just, that’s kind of just how my life is. And I wanted to share this with you because one of the videos that I get requested a lot from people in the comments and the DMS is, hey, you should do a day in the life video. Do like a vlog. And my budy Sawhill, who just started a YouTube channel a little bit ago, he. He does these amazingly. He does a great job of bringing the viewers into his life and documenting everything as he goes through his day. And I’m watching in rapt attention.

It’s like watching what was that old MTV show with road rules? I can’t remember. There was like two shows that were back in the early 2000s that I remember were so damn popular, and it was all about this reality tv show, the real world. God, I couldn’t remember the real world. And we love watching this kind of voyeuristically peeking into the lives of other people. I love doing it, at least. But the problem is, the thing that I always come back to is that I just don’t live a very interesting life. I feel like my life would be kind of a boring video, to be honest. And I know that one of the things we talk about when it comes to content creation is that we take for granted how interesting our lives actually are because we are living in the mundanity of it every single day.

But truthfully, my life is very particularly boring. And it’s kind of interesting because I was talking to a gentleman the other day at a lunch. He was young and just starting off on his entrepreneurial journey. He was still working at w two, but he had started the side hustle. And he’s like, how do you do it? You have all these different businesses. I see your content everywhere. He’s like, you must be working around the clock to be able to juggle all these balls. And the interesting thing is that at this point in my journey, that is actually the furthest thing from the case.

I actually have more white space in my calendar right now, operating multiple seven, one eight figure business. At this moment, I have more time on my schedule than I ever had before. And the reason for that is it’s intentional by design. It’s creating the systems and having the team, the people in the place that can do those things that are not necessarily the highest and best use of my skills, my abilities, my talents, and not necessarily the things I don’t want to be spending my time on. But what I wanted to talk about in this podcast today isn’t about my boring life. It isn’t about any of that. It’s actually going back to this gentleman. That conversation that I had with him is that when you’re first starting off as an entrepreneur, you’re going to be wearing all the hats, you’re going to be doing all the jobs, and it’s going to feel overwhelming.
It’s going to feel like a lot of work because you don’t have the capital yet to justify bringing on the labor, the leverage that you can get from bringing other people onto the team. And so you have to do all that work yourself. And even when you do finally have that capital that you can afford bringing people onto the team, you’re going to run into a new issue, which is that one, you don’t have any systems that you can be able to impart to them so that they can pick up the slack and do the task at 80% competency compared to how you would do it. So that’s number one. And when you have people in a role that you look over and you’re like, that person’s not performing this nearly as well as I could, you have a tendency to just take the thing back. So this is one of the very first struggles that we as entrepreneurs will have. First is that you don’t have any leverage to be able to go get those people. Then when you do get those people, you don’t have the systems that would enable you to be able to maximize that individual’s potential.
And so the beginning of the journey is very, very difficult. Your days, your hours are going to be just spent grinding away at a lot of really boring things that you don’t necessarily want to be doing. You’re going to be working on landing page designs, you’re going to be working on the copywriting, you’re going to be calling up customers, trying to get them to pay their bills. You’re going to be doing every single side of the business. But if you want to succeed long term in your entrepreneurial journey, you have to start thinking with the end in mind. Where are you trying to get to? What are you building towards? And if you don’t do this from the very beginning or as soon as possible, then you will always have a job, not a business. And this is the mistake that I see a lot of entrepreneurs make, is that they make themselves integral to the operations of their business. And all they functionally have at this point is a high paying job.
It’s a job that requires more time, more stress, more resources than if they had just taken a comparable job from another w two. In a lot of cases, they’re maybe not even making a lot of money. Right? That’s the big ambition, the big goal. But the truth is, a lot of business owners aren’t super successful financially. And so we need to build our businesses with intention from the very beginning to know that that’s not the end state that we want to live in. We want to get to the place where we’re only focusing on the things within our sphere of influence, the things that bring us joy, the things that we love doing. And when you do that, life gets a lot better, right? So the way that you start building towards that is with intention and sitting down to create your systems now, rather than waiting later. Because as soon as you start hiring people, you will start to try to train and show people how to do the processes that you do.
But because you’ve never had to teach somebody how to do it before, they are going to be probably scratching their head and be like, what the hell? I don’t understand this. And you’re going to face the very first hurdle that we all face when it comes to hiring, which is nobody can do this as well as I can do. Everybody else seems like an idiot, they’re too slow, they do it wrong. And so I might as well just do it myself. And this becomes the weight that will sink you to the bottom of the ocean for most entrepreneurs, because they just give up on hiring or they settle for hiring mediocre people and then just letting them go do their thing at a mediocre level and saying like, whatever it is, what it is, right. To get to the place where you are not vital to the machine’s day to day operations, you need to sit down right now and document all the things that you do as the owner, all the different divisions, all the different areas of your business and get them down on paper. It doesn’t need to be comprehensive and thorough in terms of the process being documented, but you need to have the outline of it and understand where is your time and energy going. And then the next step in this is to start going through step by step.
How do I currently perform this activity? And getting a framework, getting an outline for how you actually do the activity is step two. Step three is now putting it in front of people so that you can see how they do it. Put it in front of an idiot on the street. That’s my goal. When we were building escape, climbing was we should be able to have an idiot off the street come in and be able within an afternoon to be doing any one of the processes on the back line. That’s how documented and dialed in we wanted our systems to be. Now, that’s obviously a really high standard, but if you can get to that place and you never lack for talent, because the whole world is suddenly a potential hiring, a potential hire, right? So this is what you’re trying to get to is like, first figure out what are all the things that you’re doing as the owners. Next, figure out the outline of like, okay, broad strokes.

Here’s what I do when I do this activity. Then get nitty gritty and give it to somebody. Observe how they do it. And this is where you’re going to see the rubber meet the road. And you go, oh, okay, I thought I was being very clear when I explained it like this, but actually there’s a lot of nuance here that I need to get even more clear on. As you do this, then you will be able to onboard and train people more effectively, which in turn means that you can fully hand something off of your plate without having to keep an open cognitive loop in the back of your mind the whole time wondering, when am I going to have to take this back? I need to keep my eyes on them at of times because they can’t be trusted to run with this process. Right. So that’s where you need to be.

Ideally, what you should be building towards. But just even going through the mental exercise of thinking through, what does it look like for me to take what I’m doing right now in my business and to extract myself from it, and then put that vision at the forefront of your mind, because that’s what you’re trying to build towards. And if you don’t do it with intention, then you will always be in a job. And it’s a shitty job because the person that you’re working for is a crazy person. It’s you. So don’t want that. But anyway, maybe we’ll do a day in the life video at some point. If that’s something that you guys are interested in, let me know.

Shoot me a comment, leave me a DM or something like that. If there’s enough interest, then we’ll do a day in the life video. But I warn you, it will be very boring, I think. I fear so. That’s going to do it for me. Guys and, and gals appreciate all of you. We’ll see you in the next video.