What Kind of Business Do You Actually Want

Welcome back to the podcast, guys. Okay, so in this week’s string sequence of episodes, we are talking about the. What are we calling this? The seven figure launchpad. This is the ignition sequence that you need if you’re trying to get your business off the ground and you’re starting it from zero, or if you already have a little bit of momentum, maybe you’re a five figure, you’re doing six figures, and you’re like, I’d like to scale to seven figures and beyond. Well, this sequence of episodes is about five or six episodes long. I’m going to break down a framework that I use called the escape velocity framework, and go part by part in that framework to help you optimize the different componentry of your business to get to your destination. Okay, so in the previous episode, if you haven’t already listened to that, I really recommend you go listen, because I lay out the outline of the escape velocity framework. And if you remember, there’s three components.

There’s three components to this framework. There’s you, the pilot, you, the founder, the entrepreneur, you as the pilot of the vehicle, you have the vehicle itself, which I like to use the imagery or the analogy of a rocket ship. And then we have the destination. Where are we trying to get to? And we need all three of these in a very particular order. Otherwise, we’re not going to get our rocket off the ground, or we’re going to get it off the ground. We’re going to have realized we designed it all wrong. It’s going to the wrong place. So the very first step in this equation is actually the last one.

Right? It starts with you, the entrepreneur, then the vehicle, and then finally the destination. But we actually have to start with the destination first, because without that, we might not design our rocket or ourselves, as the founder of the entrepreneur, in the optimal way. And so the worst thing that we want to do is to create a rocket that’s only designed to get us to, let’s say, low Earth orbit, right? It’s. It’s like, oh, we have a rocket that takes a satellite up into space, and that’s good enough. That rocket will not get you to the moon. It will not get you to Mars. And if you get to low Earth orbit and you suddenly realize, oh, actually, you know what? I don’t want to just be here. That could be the equivalent of, I don’t want to just be a six figure entrepreneur.

I actually want to be seven or eight figures, right? I want to go to Mars. Well, that rocket, you’re not going to be able to sit there in low Earth orbit, cycling around the planet, and optimize or build out that rocket while you’re in it, you’re going to have to bring it back to the ground. You’re going to have to start over from scratch and rebuild that rocketry so that you can get to Mars. And this is what a lot of people, a lot of entrepreneurs get wrong, is they just, they get into the business, they start going, going. They get a little bit of momentum, and they’re like, look, we’re up in the air. This is so awesome. And that is amazing. But then they realize along the way, this isn’t taking me where I want to go.

And not only that, but this vehicle will never be able to get me to where I want to go. And then they get discouraged, they get burnt out, and chances are you’ve maybe experienced that, right? So we want to avoid that pain by just starting very clearly with the end in mind. So this is the very first thing that we’re going to talk about in this episode, is setting the destination. Where is it that we’re trying to get to? And so the question to ask yourself is, what’s the goal? What’s my desired outcome? If you were to fast forward 510 15 years from now, and everything has gone swimmingly, has gone better than you could have ever possibly imagined, what does that reality look like? You want to get as crystal clear about that vision as possible, and you want to sit down and you want to write this out. You should be able to describe that future with as much clarity as you describe your current situation. Right. You need to be able to see it in your eyes because it is very hard to hit targets that you can’t see. The more clearly we can see it, the more quickly we can move towards it.

Clarity equals speed. When you’re not clear about where you’re trying to go, you start to hem, you start to haul, you look left, you look right, and you’re not moving forward with targeted intensity. Right. So clarity leads to speed. And so this is where we want to start, is getting really clear about what’s that desired outcome that we’re building towards. What does winning look like? And some of the questions you’re going to want to ask yourself is in five years, let’s say you’re going to want to do this on different timeframes. Like one year from now, five years from now, you’re 15 year, and you’re going to ask yourself, okay, what does winning look like? We’ve talked about this in the context of winning the day. A lot of people, they go through their lives never defining what does it actually look like to win the day.
And so they get to the end of their day and because they never defined what winning looks like, they feel like a failure. They feel like they lost because the to do list, it just ever, you know, continues to ever expand. So we want to avoid this by starting by defining what does the win look like? What’s the win contingency. So maybe that’s a revenue number, maybe it’s a profit number. Maybe it’s a amount of hours that you’re working number. Maybe it’s a number of products or types of products that you’re building. Maybe it’s a, I want to have a certain size team, or, you know, maybe that’s, I want to be managing 1000 people, or I want to have a team of 100 people, or maybe it’s the reverse. And you decide, you know, I’d rather build a business that is as small and as profitable as possible.
I don’t care about doing $100 million in revenue. All I really want is to make $2 million a year in profits. And I would like to keep my team as simple and small as possible while delivering the most amazing, exceptional product experience for my customers. And that is going to inform a very different journey than if you were saying, you know what, I want to build a billion dollar company and I want to be managing a complex team of 1000 people across three different continents, servicing this wide plethora of different product suites. Right. Very different companies that you’re trying to build, getting clear on that from the beginning will help you make decisions as you go along the path. And so when the question becomes, okay, how do we continue scaling here? If you’ve decided, I want to keep it small and I only want to be managing a team of two to five people, well, then when you get to five people and you’re running into roadblocks, you already know it’s not acceptable to throw more people onto the problem because labor is only one way to solve a problem, and it’s often the easiest way, is just to throw more bodies at the problem. But if your goal is to keep the team small and keep profitability high and keep the quality of the product to consumers very high, then you have to solve that problem in a very different way.

But having that constraint to say I don’t want to be managing a big team will help you define what are the things you are willing to sacrifice and what are the things you’re not willing to sacrifice. So another way to think about this is, what would a pyrrhic victory be? A pyrrhic victory is just a really cool term for, you win the battle, but you lost the war, or you won the battle, but at such extreme cost that really, there was no winner. It’d be like two armies battling and, you know, 1000 people on each side die, and your army is decimated, but you have the last. You’re the last standing person. And so technically, you’ve won, but what? At what cost? Right. So it’s about, it’s a war that you’ve won or a battle that you’ve won. A victory that’s not really worth winning. That’s a pyrrhic victory.

And this is very common in entrepreneurship. A lot of us win the battle that at the end of it, it’s like, that wasn’t a victory worth winning. I didn’t want the prize. And if you play stupid games, you win stupid prizes. So we need to get very clear, what would that be? And, for instance, some of the things that you might think through is like, I don’t want to build a $10 million company if it means I have to miss my kids soccer games, if it means I’m being pulled away from my family dinners or I’m not able to do these activities, or if it means that I have to, you know, take on debt or take on a level of risk that I’m not comfortable with. Whatever it is, like, you need to define that for yourself and get very clear. What are the things that you are willing to sacrifice in pursuit of your goals, and what are the things that you’re not willing to sacrifice. So it’s almost like you’re anti goals.

Like, what would it look like to achieve your goals, but in a way that you’re not satisfied with the outcome because of how you did it. Because. Because at the end of the day, the ends do not justify the means if those ends come at the expense of things that you weren’t willing to sacrifice in the beginning. So get very, very clear as you’re setting your destination. What’s my goal? What does winning look like? What is a pyrrhic victory? What are my anti goals? What are the things that I’m not willing to give up? What do I need to avoid? And through this exercise, you will gain clarity, which you then will be able to apply to your decision making processes, which lead to speed. And speed is all important when it comes to business. So do that exercise. Go through the go through the exercise.

Ask yourself these questions. Answer them for yourself. Spend some, some time on this because this is critical. We don’t want to take off with our rocket or even start building it until we are very clear on what the machine needs to look like because of where we’re trying to get it to. All right, so that’s going to do it for me here. To get to you guys in the next episode, we’re going to be talking about basic training for the founder because you are the pilot of the rocket. So before we even build the rocket, we’re going to be talking about you as the entrepreneur because we’re going to be building you and the rocket concurrently together. Because you’re a symbiotic relationship.

Your skills, your ability to navigate that vehicle is going to dictate how far and how fast you can drive. So tune into that episode when you’re ready. I’ll catch you guys over there. But until then, stay hyper focused, my friends. Bye.