Welcome to the Impact Podcast. I'm Eddie Wilson, here to help you visualize what others cannot see, create opportunities where others have failed, and push you to build empires where once there was empty space. Let's embark on this journey together and make a difference in this world. The title of today's podcast is When You Are The Problem. Founders are great people, they're amazing, they're incredible, but oftentimes they get to a certain level where they create bottlenecks in their business. And so we're going to go from bottlenecks to breakouts today. We're going to jump in and we're going to go deeper. And I'm going to show you in these areas where you're actually stifling your business, you're choking it, you're holding it back, and then we're going to tackle it together. The number one threat to your business isn't the market, it's usually you. I'm going to call out today what the thing that founders and entrepreneurs hate to admit, including myself. For me, I find myself oftentimes, if I'm not careful, if I don't come into an intention in my business, drowning in decisions, approvals, and follow-up. Decisions, approvals, and follow-up, if you're not careful, will take a majority of your day. And when that takes the majority of your day, I can guarantee that you're the bottleneck. So let's get into how do you know if you are? Let me give you five quick ways to know if you're the bottleneck. You ready? I want you to check the box and I want you to add your score up. You ready? Number one, are you still the main approver on everything? Are you approving everything? Does 90% of all decisions in your business go through you? If so, that's number one. Number two, your team asks for permission more than they act with clarity. Your team asks for permission more than they act with clarity. So it's this constant check-in. Like, are you okay with this? Is this good for you? Is this, that means you're not empowering, right? So is that you? So make sure you're adding your score up. Number three, your schedule is full of operations and not strategy. If you look back over your schedule, does it look like you're a project manager and you're looking at all operations? Or are you looking at strategy? Is there every time in your schedule where there's actually strategy sessions scheduled? Number four, you haven't taken a five-day break without interruption in the last six months. Now, I am extremely guilty of this. I got to hold my finger up on that one. Definitely a checkbox for me. You haven't taken a five-day break without interruption in six months. The last one, the company can't win without you in the room. You have to be present in every meeting. You have to be present in every decision. You have to be present, present, however, it's always in the operational side. What was your score? Zero to five. Were you a one, two, three, four, five? I can tell you that if you hit even one of these, you are creating bottlenecks in your business. Now, it might not be severe, but it's going to be very, very present. If you're still making all the decisions, you didn't build a company, you built a dependency. If you're still making all the decisions, you didn't build a company, you built a dependency. And that's really important because the path to creating the bottlenecks in your business is dependency. When all things point at you, there's no way for you to make all the decisions in your business as it grows. How do we fix it? How do we change these five things? Number one, here's the three ways to fix it, and then I'm going to give you a challenge at the end. Number one, brick-led thinking. This is something that I teach at Empire, and I've taught this concept a lot in the podcast in the past, but in your business, there shouldn't be 50 KPIs. There should be 100 KPIs, key performance indicators. There should be enough that you can govern the business, but there should be one primary KPI. We call this the brick. The brick is the foundational piece. We often say that we don't build empires through philosophy or through doing it ourselves. We build empires one brick at a time. What is the brick? It's your most important key performance indicator, your KPI. Your KPI that you're focusing on that drives all other KPIs. There's always one. We call this the brick. Every empire has one brick. If your team doesn't know it, then they can't lead without you. For instance, if you walked into this building, this is Collective Influence. This is my private equity firm here, and if you were to go into any business, I can tell you that any of the businesses that we oversee or operate here, if they don't understand their brick, then they can't lead without me because then they don't have this centralized mission and focus that all decisions can be made from. For instance, we have what's called the Aspire Tour. The Aspire Tour is the nation's largest business tour. We stop city to city to city, and our brick, our centralized KPI. Now, we have lots of them. We have KPIs on ticket sales, on ROAS, or on CAC, or on all these various things. We have sales. We have show rate. We have from show rate to any of our master classes. We have conversion all the way into our community. We've got all these KPIs. However, the brick is not ticket sales. The brick that we focus on, that our entire team knows, is how many people actually show up at Aspire. You can't change somebody's life at an Aspire conference unless they actually show up. You'll see that we put lots of emphasis on selling tickets, but we put the most emphasis on making sure that the people who bought tickets actually show up. We gauge our success on the percentage of people that actually show up. That's our brick. That's the focus of that business. Every single one of my businesses have a brick. If you have a centralized, core, common KPI set with one central brick, it'll allow you to force all leadership through that focal point, and then others will know how to lead. Define the one number that matters. Define the one number that matters, then get it posted, owned, and tie it to every single meeting. The more your people know, the more you focus on that brick, then the more emphasis and lift you'll receive. Number two, you have to have a meeting structure. You have to have a rhythm. You have to have a cadence of making sure that you're solving problems, looking at data, solving problems, looking at data, solving problems. When there's a rhythm there and a cadence for how you solve problems, then all of a sudden, things begin to change. I live by the acronym CLEAR, and if you ever are interested in that, you can dive into my teaching on Empire on the acronym CLEAR. It helps you go through that decision-making process. You've got to remove your day-to-day check-ins. When you have a meeting rhythm, it removes those day-to-day check-ins. Those day-to-day check-ins are only necessary when you have to move the needle in a short window. If not, they should be bound to weekly meetings so that they're centralized. Those weekly or those daily check-ins are what kill you in time. You replace it with one consistent cross-functional, what we call win meeting. Win stands for weekly important numbers. That way, I know my information on a weekly basis and I have a cadence of solving it. Then I have what's called stop-layer reports, and that brings the data to the top. It lets me focus on the things that matter. That's the meeting rhythm. Number three, we call it replacement through clarity. Here's the problem. If you don't have a centralized KPI system with a focal point called a brick, if you don't have a weekly meeting rhythm, then you can't get to a place where you replace yourself. Once you get to that data-driven approach, you can replace yourself through clarity. I say this. Delegation without clarity is abdication. Delegation without clarity is abdication, meaning you're walking away from your rules and responsibility. The things that it's an abdication of your responsibility as a leader. However, if you delegate with clarity, then it's responsible. It's not abdication. Now, you are lifting that person up and you're elevating them. If you write every recurring task into the rhythm, you write those recurring tasks that you're doing on a consistent basis. I'll tell you one that I've been recently doing. Up until maybe two weeks ago, every Wednesday night, I went through our corporate accounts payables. We were in a transition period of a former CFO into a new CFO. In order to manage cash flow, you're constantly managing your accounts payables. I delegate all accounts receivables. All that stuff is tied into our CRO, Chief Revenue Officer. Our accounts payables because it wasn't quite transition into our CFO. I had to do every Wednesday night. I'd find myself going through, 500 payables across the corporation. Every Wednesday night from 10pm till about 2 in the morning, for the last, I would say, four months. I did that every single time because I didn't have time to do it during the day. I didn't have a process to do it. That was a recurring task. I was doing that. I literally come in Thursday. I'm tired. I'm wore out. I go through 500 payables. I would decide what was most important. I would look at the things that we were trying to pay too early without the 30-day. I was managing our cash flow through this AP process by four hours worth of diving into data every Wednesday night. Two weeks ago, I took that recurring task and I gave it to our new CFO. Then, I helped him through the first time doing it. I made sure he did it right. The second time that he did it, I had him do it by himself. Then, I had him bring the results back. I looked at it to confirm that it was what I liked. Now, all of a sudden, three weeks later, my Wednesday nights are free. This Wednesday night, I'm going to go to bed at 10 o'clock at night. For me, that's the process. Look at recurring tasks. Then, you can, with clarity, pass them on. Then, document the decision process you want your leaders to follow. If you have someone, maybe it's you, maybe you can use an AI tool to capture this. You can have an assistant capture this. But as you sit in leadership meetings and rules are established, oftentimes, as entrepreneurs, you establish rules and you don't realize it. You'll say things like, hey, next time, make sure you do this. Or, hey, anytime this happens, I want you to make this and you have to have somebody listening. You can program an AI tool to listen for this. You can program a person to listen for this. Or, you can physically do it yourself. But every time you establish a rule, write the rule down. Keep a repository of the rules. Every time we do this, make sure we do this. Every time you set a rule, make sure that it is documented. Why? Because if your rules are documented, they can then be replicated. Let me give you a quick story. Number one, brick-led thinking. Number two, weekly rhythms and meetings. Number three, replacement. Replacing yourself through clarity. If you just take that step, take a small step and I'll give you a challenge here in just a minute, but take a small step this week. Don't think about delegating everything in your life. Choose the one thing like I just talked about. APs. That process of getting accounts payables off my plate, I can't tell you how much stress that's removed in my own life. Find the one that's causing the most stress and begin to delegate it. Let me give you a quick example and then I'll jump into a challenge. I was working with a founder and we have the Empire Operating System and we have what's called fractional COOs. I have a bench of fractional COOs, CFOs and so when I buy a business, I'll pull that kind of fractional off the shelf to come help me part-time that way I'm not paying an executive salary and it helps me get a business off the ground for a much cheaper cost. This fractional and I were working with this founder who built an eight-figure company. We're not in startup mode anymore. This founder that built an eight-figure company, it was in the healthcare space. I'm not going to give you specifics, but I want to make sure that I'm holding this person's information and confidence. She was in the healthcare space, eight figures and she was stuck. The three things she was stuck in as we actually were going through it, I wrote these three things down as we were coaching her where I was looking at her decision-making kind of tree and where she was spending her most time. The three things that I wrote down was I said number one, she's approving all invoices. The reason she was approving all invoices is because a lot of their receivables were tied to Medicare. Medicare was having some payment issues and because of that, it was slowing down their cash flow and so she was approving the invoices. It was just like me going through the AP process. She also was highly focused on their marketing language. She would consistently, like every social post, she was looking at approving. Every piece of copy going out, approving. She was literally diving into every funnel, so automated sequences on their patients, reminders. She was changing every single word. She was so tied into the marketing language. Number three, hiring decisions. She was literally hiring somewhere between 10 and 15 nurses a week. I'm sorry, a month. She was spending a ton of time being the final decision maker on the nurses. She's approving invoices. She's essentially playing the role of a controller. She's approving all marketing language and everything going out physically. That is almost like your marketing director or vice president of marketing. She was approving all hiring decisions and she was deep in the weeds, HR. How are you supposed to be a CEO, the visionary leader, if you are also the finance person and you're also the marketing person and you're also the HR person? It's impossible and that's what entrepreneurs do to themselves. She had no brick. She didn't have a centralized focal point, a core KPI. She was approving a minimum of 52 major decisions a week. We literally counted them out. We said, okay, does this have to be approved? Does this have to be approved by you? 52 major ones. That's not including the minor ones of like, hey, change this word in the marketing copy. These are 52 major decisions a week. Just divide that into a five-day work week, right? Which she was working seven. So what was the fix? I implemented win meetings, literally a meeting structure. I gave her three months to pull back and I structured exactly what I just told you. So this was me coaching a business owner that was doing eight figures. I literally made her do the exact same thing. Lead with a brick, get into a meeting cadence and begin to replace through clarity. We implemented the wins. We gave her three months. We took one quarter and we said, hey, in three months, 12 weeks, we're going to radically pull you back and systematically. Here's the result. She had a 90% reduction in direct approvals. That was the 52 decisions a week. 90% of those we were able to get off of her plate. Here's the result. She had a 40% increase in margin. This is huge. Think about it. If you could increase 40% now, this is between her cogs and her cost of goods. That's like, you know, she took a contract, nurses fulfilled it. The 40% was the total margin. That wasn't profit. It was total margin as a disclaimer, but 40% increase in margin. She took two weeks completely offline after that three month time period. So 12 weeks in and she took a two week vacation and we watched the actual company grow during those two weeks. They actually landed two more significant clients in those two weeks. Her HR director hired two or three nurses in those two weeks. Her marketing girl actually put out copy without her and they still had just as much reach and engagement on social. Two weeks, she took off. Two weeks, the company still grew. To me, that's the biggest win I can give an entrepreneur. So when you're listening to me today and I'm talking to you about this, I know what I'm talking about. I've helped people coach people out of this situation and the three things I just gave you were gold, whether you, whether you receive them or not. This was not magic. This isn't some magical pill I gave her and I said, Hey, it's time to take some time off. Hey, you don't have to carry the stress for your entire business. It's, it's not magic. It's architecture. It's not magic. It's architecture. It's just literally taking these three simple points, brick lead thinking, meeting rhythms and replacement through clarity with intention. And you can get yourself out of the stress of the business. All right. So you're ready. Here's the call to action. The call to action. Number one, audit your calendar. If you don't have everything on your calendar that you're currently doing, make sure it gets on your calendar. Number two, audit that calendar. Start looking at it. The calendar is the playbook. The calendar is how I know if I jump in to help a founder, I'm typically looking at their calendar, auditing the calendar first. Number two, how many decisions do you need to make in a week? I then audit the decision making process. How much of this filters through you? There's only so many good decisions you can make. If you're curious, ask your team. Give them permission to be honest with you. Give them permission to give you true feedback and then ask your team, how many decisions am I making a week that I, that I could make that you could make without me, right? To your team. Then you ask the team this, this is the question. Get your team together and say, Hey, if I had to step away for 30 days, what would have to change for this company to run without me? Have an honest, open, one hour discussion on what would have to change in order for the team to run your company for 30 days without you. Start architecting the path that way. Okay, so here's the challenge this week. I want to make it simple for you. I'm not going to make you go implement all these three things. I hope you took the notes. I hope if you're in the car, you're going to be like, you know what, when I get back, wherever you are listening to this, write these three things down, right? Brick led thinking, meeting rhythms, clarity, replacement through clarity. But here's the challenge. I want you to pick one meeting this week, just one. It's very simple. One meeting this week and remove yourself from it. Systemize it. Give somebody instructions on how you want the meeting to run and ask them to report back. Just remove yourself from the meeting. Tell them how you want the meeting to run. Ask them to give you feedback on how it ran. Give you data back, right? That's all you have to do. That's one simple step. Will you do that for me today? Empires do not require you. That's what makes them last. Freedom doesn't come from exiting. It comes from replacing. Does that make sense? Not from exiting, from replacing. And I want you to understand this as we kind of draw this podcast to a close. You don't own your business if it doesn't run without you. You don't own your business if it doesn't run without you. It actually owns you. If your business runs only with you, then your business owns you. You don't own it if it doesn't own without you. So make sure that you are implementing these things. Brick led thinking, the when meeting rhythm, the meeting rhythms, and lastly, replacement through clarity. And if this hits you like a ton of bricks because I know it should, make sure you pass this on to someone else that you know this can make a difference for them. Pass it on. Give this data to someone else. Help someone else get out of the same situation, the same stuck feeling that you're in today.
