THIS is Why You Can’t Grow Your Business

Alright, so I want to share with you today one of the biggest limiting beliefs I had for a very long time on my entrepreneurial journey and it cost me a lot of opportunity and it inflicted a lot of brain damage on me in the meantime. Now, the reason I’m thinking about this is because I just had somebody comment on one of my YouTube videos that was espousing the same limiting belief that I had for so long. His belief was this. We were talking about leverage, in particular, labor leverage. And what was his business? It was some kind of service based business. I think it was home inspections. So after all the costs and everything associated with going to deliver a home inspection, he would net about $300 per inspection. So his question was, how do I scale this? And the thing that then followed was, I can’t hire because nobody will deliver the same quality product with the values that I expect of them.

And this is a very similar mindset that I had for a very long time. I think it’s one that a lot of entrepreneurs will resonate with, which is that nobody will care as much as you do about the product. You as the owner will care the most. It is your baby, so it is only natural that it’s going to mean the most to you. Second is how do you get people to do the thing as well as you do? Now, in a lot of cases, when you first start your very first business, you’re doing a thing that you’re already very skilled at. And as a result of getting skilled at it, you’re like, oh, maybe I could do this as a freelance. I could go independent. I could start selling my services.

Right. That’s not quite a business like in a full fledged sense quite yet. What you really have is you just have another w two where you’re just the boss until you can start implementing systems and people into the process so that they’re doing the work on your behalf and you’re building the business, not just executing the work. You don’t really have a business quite yet. And so that’s where this gentleman is right now. He is doing the work and you can make good money doing that. Like, no doubt you can do great. My girlfriend Jamie, her uncle is a home inspector and he does a fantastic job and he doesn’t have any employees.
Now, I think the key there is if you’re going to go that route, you need to charge a lot for your services. That’s the only way to make it viable in the long term. Right? So this gentleman, he’s making $300 per house. That’s not going to cut it because house inspection is going to take a couple of hours. That’s just not enough. So he’s probably doing low end housing. You need to go upstream either to commercial real estate or into premium real estate, maybe where rich people are getting divorces and now they need somebody to come in and split the baby and tell us how much is this house worth? Right. You can make way more in that domain.
Short of that, the solution is to recognize that you have a limiting belief. A limiting belief that says nobody will care as much about your product or deliver the product as well as you. And therefore you shouldn’t hire anybody. Right. This is an excuse I see so many people make. Truth is, you’re probably not that great at what you do. The truth is somebody else coming in and implementing your systems and processes, doing the thing at 80% as good as you can do it is probably good enough for the marketplace. So number one is just removing your ego from the equation and stop pretending like your customers are getting some incredible valuable thing.
At $300 per home inspection, they’re not getting something so extraordinary that they wouldn’t just at a moment’s notice, drop you and go with the next option. At that price point, you’re a commodity. So let’s be honest about that, okay? The truth though is you can find people to do the work just as well as you can. You just don’t know how to hire and train for it. And in fact, I believe you could even make people care as much about your business as you do. The trick, make them owners. Make them have an owner mentality. Give them incentives that make them want to show up and work just as hard as you do for the thing you do.
That I bet they will show up and work just as hard as you do. Now. I’m not saying that’s the route that you should go and you should be giving everybody equity and making everybody co owners in your business. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying you could. You could do that. Now, the game of business, especially when it comes to labor leverage, is one of incentives. Really understanding what’s in it for the other person.
What are they getting out of this? Is it just the paycheck? Is the bonuses? Is it the benefits? What is it that they are really after? And when you understand what those incentives are and then how to push and pull them, you can find people to do excellent work for you. This was such a limiting belief for me for a long time, especially when we were washing windows. I had a hard time with it initially because we were hiring a lot of my friends who were rock climbers, and they just didn’t care. They just didn’t. And so the way that I got them to care was by paying them way more than they could make doing anything else and giving them flexibility with their calendar. I gave them flexibility, and in exchange, I expected dependability. You show up when I call and I will be flexible with your needs, and you will get paid more than you would make doing anything comparably. And so you can find somebody to go do that work for you.
You’re probably just not willing to pay them what you would have to pay them to do the work. That’s a different question entirely. Because, again, a lot of that comes down to ego, not wanting to pay people more than industry average or the standard, because you’re like, well, that’s not fair. This should cost, right? This should only be a $15 an hour job. I’m not willing to pay them 30, right. Well, then you’re going to get a $15 an hour employee, and you’re just going to have to suck it up, buttercup. The other side of this is hiring and training. These are skills, and I really suck at them to this day.
I’m not great at them, but I know that they are critically important for scaling any enterprise. And for me, knowing where I’m at in my business career, to make the jump, if I want to make the jump to ten figures, which isn’t really a goal of mine. If it was, though, I would have to focus on my leadership, my hiring, my training, all of those systems and processes as they are right now. They’re good enough for building seven and eight figure businesses. And even we’re on the cusp of a nine figure business, so good enough for what’s needed. But if you’re not able to scale from your five figures to six or to seven, it’s because you probably have not yet leveled up. Your hiring, your training, and your incentivization processes. Get those dialed in and you can definitely scale any business like it’s doable.

You can find people who care, who do the work, who deliver a great product, who live in alignment with your values. It is possible these are not unicorns. You just have to level up your skills. So that’s the end of my rant. I got kind of a little animated there. So sorry. I’ll get off my soapbox now. Guys, I appreciate you being here, as always.

Thank you so much. Catch you in the next episode. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friend. Bye.