This Is The Reason Your Business Is Struggling To Grow

So in my experience, there’s two types of entrepreneurs. You have one type of entrepreneur who’s constantly running around with their hair on fire, they’re putting out fires left and right, and everything is just really dramatic. Everything needs to be handled right now. And it feels as though they’re treading water and the waves are constantly getting bigger and bigger. They’re falling behind and they don’t have time to focus on the things that would actually move their business forward or make it sustainable. And these entrepreneurs, they might be doing well financially. You can be making a lot of money. That’s not necessarily a correlate here, but they don’t have time for anything else in their life.

Their business is all consuming and it’s causing them stress, it’s causing them ulcers. And these are the types of entrepreneurs that either ultimately burn out, they get sick and they can’t keep operating their business. And because they don’t really have the systems in place that would allow the business to operate without them just running around like 15 hours a day, like grinding around the clock to make the thing work, it just ends up imploding. The second group of entrepreneurs though, are the ones that have figured out how to focus on activities and objectives that have impact. And activities that are impactful for the business are not always the most urgent. In fact, they’re rarely the most urgent. Usually the things that are urgent are lower importance because life just has a way of throwing 100 different things at you. And if we’re following Proto’s principle 80 20, that only 20% of that’s actually going to matter.

That just means like, statistically, the vast majority of things that are coming across our plate that is on fire and needs our attention is going to be not important tasks. So how do we get out of the, the frame of working urgently versus working with impact? And I think a big part of this is simply understanding two concepts. Number one is not all fires need to be put out. Sometimes the best way to put out a fire is just to let it burn. Like 90% of the things that are happening inside your business. And that’s like a pretty big, pretty big percentage. But like, a lot of the fires that are occurring inside your business would just naturally resolve themselves if you did nothing else, and it wouldn’t really have a massive impact on the business and the grand scheme of things. Now, when you tell most entrepreneurs that they go into defensive mode, they’re like, no, no, no, no, this is a really important fire.

If I don’t handle Susan over here in accounting today, like that drama with so and so and the billing thing or whatever, like, it’s gonna, it’s gonna blow up my business. It’s like, is it really, is it really gonna do that? No, it’s not. The second thing, if you wanna be able to operate from a place of impact versus urgency, is to identify what is actually important versus just urgent. Well, you have to have a prioritization management system. You have to wait, have an objective measure of what would move the needles meaningfully in your business. This is why I recommend, you know, a system like ice, which, you know, you take all the activities inside of your business. You rank it based off of impact, confidence, ease. We’ve done other episodes on this.

Working through the Eisenhower matrix is also a very powerful frame where you graph out, okay, activities are important versus activities that are urgent. You rank order them, and you start to tackle the things that are important, not just urgent, by scheduling them into your calendar. You put them, you actually say, like, this is the most important thing. It’s not necessarily urgent, but I’m gonna show that it’s important by prioritizing it and putting it on my calendar. Cause at the end of the day, if you show me your bank account and you show me your calendar, I can tell you what you value. If you tell me, I value my time with my family and my friends, but I look at your calendar and you don’t make time for them. There’s no time blocks for them. And I look at your calendar, you’re not really spending time and money on that, then you don’t really value that, right? So where your money goes and where your time goes is where your level of prioritization goes.

So that’s number two. Truth, though, is it’s hard. It’s really hard to not get sucked into the urgent on a day to day basis, regardless of where you are in your business. Like, as you grow, the problems don’t go away, they just get bigger. And that’s, that’s the blessing of being an entrepreneur, is that you get to solve bigger and bigger problems. Um, but you gotta get better at identifying, oh, that’s just an urgent thing, but not an important thing. And being, okay, saying, like, I don’t need to handle every single little fire, just let it burn, and focus on the really big movers. And I think overall, you’re going to work less, you’re going to enjoy the work you do more, and it’s going to have a bigger impact on your business.

So ask yourself, am I an entrepreneur? That’s operating from urgency or impact. The way that you can know if you’re operating from urgency is you look back at the end of the day and you worked hard. You worked hard for the day. You were running from this, that to the other thing, and you were like, you didn’t have a minute to catch your breath or have lunch or anything like that. And yet you look back on your day and you can’t really identify what you did. It was just this, that, this other thing, but you can’t put your finger on, oh, I really did this activity and this moved the needle. If you can’t do that, then it tells me that you’re not working on the things that are really important. Do less, better.

That’s really important here is that we’re not trying to do more. That’s not what productivity is. It’s about being effective with our time. Quite often that means do less, but better. So ask yourself, what are the fewest number of levers that if you were to pull inside your business would have the biggest impact on where it is you’re trying to go and everything else, all those other tiny little levers and buttons, ignore them and only pull the big ones. Focus on that. Your business will grow. You’ll love it a lot more.

And that’s going to do it for me, guys. We’ll catch you in the next episode.