Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the Mastermind for Business podcast. I'm Mark Creed and your host. This is the podcast that's designed to help you, the business owner, to spend a whole lot less time in your business and more time in your life. And in this episode, we're going to talk about your thermostat, your wealth thermostat, your business thermostat. We're going to talk about how you need to get out of the trenches and the one, the one big thing that holds most business owners back.
[00:00:32] Speaker B: If you want more time, money, freedom, and have a business that's not reliant on you, then you're in the right place. Each week, Mark Creedon, along with some of the very best business minds in the world, will take you through simple, practical steps you can take to create the business you always wanted. From his own practical experience, Mark will show you how to work less, make more, and get the business you always wanted, the one that you deserve. Now, here's your host, one of Australia's most sought after business coaches, Mark Creedon.
[00:01:21] Speaker A: Welcome to the latest edition of the Mastermind for Business podcast. I'm Mark Creedon, your host. And today we're going to talk about the one big thing that holds most business owners back. We're going to get to that shortly, but before we do that, I really want to get underway and talk about the concept of staying in the trenches.
So one of the things that I see with our mastermind clients is this propensity to, to stay in the trenches. And what I mean by that, particularly if you're a technician of some sort, so say you're a trades person or a specialist, you're a professional. And so what got you into your business was actually the trade or the profession, the trade that you apply.
And so you're really good at it. I mean, let's use a, let's use an example. Say you are a, you're a bricklayer and you're a really good bricklayer.
But as your bricklaying business grows, you bring on other people. You get on a bookkeeper, you start to grow your business, things start to improve.
But there's this strong pull, there's this strong desire to stay doing the bricklaying because it's what you really love to do. And so if we go back to the concept of Dan Martel's four time zones where we spoke about, there's the time of incompetence, the time zone of competence, zone of competence, zone of excellence. In zone of genius, it feels like it should fit into your zone of genius, because it's something you're just bloody good at and that you really enjoy doing. The problem is, it's not going to bring about the highest return on your time.
And so one of the struggles that I see people face is how do they extract themselves from being in the trenches? In other words, how do they extract themselves from. From doing the work? If you're a lawyer, you're really good at reading contracts and giving advice on it, and that's what you love to do. But that, in fact, may not be the highest and best use of your time in terms of advancing the growth of your practice, treating your practice as a business.
You may continue to do that kind of work at the really high level for your really high level clients, where you're charging out at a substantial hourly rate, which is a lot higher than you normally would. But the danger is that there's a level of comfort in continuing to do this work.
And the issue that I see is what stops people from growing their business is that level. They stay in there because they enjoy it. They're really good at it.
So the question is, how do you get yourself out of the trenches? How do you stop yourself from working in the business, doing the things that you really kind of love to do? Or the other question is, should you actually do that? And that's probably the question that I really want to explore right now. Let's do it.
Right. So the first question is, really, should I get out of it? And I guess the answer to that depends on what you want to do with your business. In all of the clients that we work within, our mastermind business accelerator program, it's all really about helping them to scale their business for a particular reason. So whether it's scaling to exit, whether it's scaling to exit completely, whether it's scaling to sell, whether it's scaling to exit a certain component of the business. So I always think the first thing that you need to do before you determine, hey, do I answer the question? Do I actually need to get out of the trenches? Is, what do you really want to do with your business? If you are happy having a business that is essentially a job and that makes you happy, and you understand that you're fully cognizant of the fact that that's what you're doing, there's probably not an issue, right? There's no reason, you know, it's one of those, it ain't broke, so don't fix it. There's probably no reason why you should do anything different but for most of the people that I talk to and the most of the people that we work with, people who have read my book, how to have a business, not just a job, without really killing yourself in the process. The people who listen to this podcast are, generally speaking, people who want to get out of the trenches. They actually want to scale their business again, whether it's scaling to sell, whether it's scaling to remove themselves from the day to day, whether it's scaling for expansion so they can focus on other things. The point is they want to scale it. And so in order to scale it, they need to get themselves out of that doing the day to day stuff. So step number one is to determine what it is that you really want to do with your business. Step number two is to then go. Right now I need to identify how can I do the stuff that I love to do in a way which is going to bring about the highest possible return.
So if we go back to our bricklayer and lawyer examples, for a lawyer, it's relatively easy. Let's say your charge out rate is, I don't know, dollar 500 an hour. You go, well, do you know what? I love doing this contract work that I do, but I'm only going to do the contract work that pays me $700 an hour or $800 an hour or $1,000 an hour. They are for the high net worth clients, the corporate clients, the clients who really need specialized device. I'm going to niche down the advice that I'm giving or niche down the area of work that I'm doing. And that's how you get yourself out of the trenches. Now, instead of spending 100% of your time doing that work, you're probably spending 20% of your time, and you can then spend the 80% of the time working on the business. So it doesn't have to be an all or nothing, right? It's not one of those things where you have to go, well, either I'm in the trenches or I'm completely out of them. In other words, I'm doing the work or I'm not. I remember talking to a good friend of mine who studied nursing years ago, and she said that she, she loved, she loved the science and the caring aspect of nursing, so she loved actually working with the patients, and they were talking about advancing the career. And she was offered all these career advancement opportunities that she rejected. And the reason she rejected them is because the more she advanced up the scale, the less patient contact she had, and that's not what she wanted. So she wanted to stay 100%, and so she never moved into nursing administration, never moved into, into advancing her nursing career in that regard, in the normal process. So she stayed patient contact because that's what she wanted to do. So we've already said, if that's what you want to do, that's fine, but in your business, you can find a way that you can find a balance between these two. So you can go about and go, well, now I'm only going to do the high net worth things, or really the high return. Same for your bricklaying. You want to still do some bricklaying. If you love bricklaying, that's fine. But now you only do the specialist project. So you're not bricklaying fences anymore. You're bricklaying the special contracts that come through, and you're charged at a much higher rate.
I've got consultants in our mastermind program, and they go, yep, this is my consulting fee. It's this amount per hour for the services of the consultants in our business. If you want to work with me personally, then it's this per hour and it's a substantially higher rate.
And so you can look at how you can stay involved in that kind of technical work. You can still be a technician, but what you want to be doing is working in the technician role maybe 20, 30% of the time, and spending the other 70% to 80% of the time actually working on the business and growing the business. And so you can find this balance. So, number one, work out whether that's what you want to do. Number two, set yourself a target.
Target is I want to be able to work 20, 30% of my time in the technician, in the technician role in the trenches. And this is how I'm going to do it. I'm going to aim it at this particular market. I'm going to niche it down to this market. I'm going to sell it for this price, this price per hour, per unit, whatever it might be.
Step number three is to then go, okay, that's great. I'm going to now take all of this time that. So I'm freeing myself up, say, of 70% of the time, who is going to now do that 70% of that technical work. And so you have to, you have to prepare yourself for that process. You start lining yourself up, and it's about working out who is the next hire you need in your business. And it may very well be that it's a technician, or it may be that you could outsource it or that you could use AI to assist you. You can use technology, there's a whole bunch of different ways, but you have to actually create a plan. So step number one, work out whether that is what you want to do. Step number two is to set yourself a sort of a target 20, 30% of the time that you want to be in the trenches as a technician. Step number three is to work out what now? What am I going to do? How am I going to get this 70% of the work done that I'm now not doing? Do I outsource it? Do I hire someone? Do I use technology? What, what are the options that are open to me? And then step number four, and the final step is to look at, okay, now that that's happening, what do I do with this 70% of time? I've now got rid of this technical stuff. I'm now stepping out of the trenches. I've now got my head above the trenches and looking at, you know, at the future, the horizon, what's going on from the business, what am I going to do with that? And that's about having a really clear plan for what's involved in getting your business up to that next stage, whatever that next stage may be for you. And so I simply work backwards on that. And I look at it, I set myself a three year plan and I go, okay, I'm not going to be doing the day to day coaching for 100% of the business. I'm going to be doing it for 30%. I've got somebody else, I've got other coaches doing the other 70%.
So then with that 70% I'm now going to work on, how do I use that 70% of the time to advance my business? What's my business plan? I go, well, where do I want to be in three years time? If that's where I want to be in three years time, where do I need to be in twelve months time?
What do I need to do in the next 90 days in order to achieve that? So it's a three step process working backwards.
Here's the slight variation to that. What if you're sitting listening to this podcast right now and you go, you know what, mark, that's fine, but the reality is I love laying bricks.
I want to build a really big business, but I love laying bricks. So thats okay, you can keep doing that, but you have to follow the same philosophy and you just turn it a little bit on its head. So what you then do is you go, right, Im going to continue to lay bricks, but what Im going to do is Im going to spend 70% of my time laying bricks, 30% of the time working on the business.
But I must get somebody, whether its an employee, an outsourcer, technology, a contractor, whatever it might be, to pick up that 70%. But now they are working on the business. So it might be that you love being the bricklayer and you want to keep doing that, but now you need to get yourself a bookkeeper. Now maybe you need to get yourself a general manager or a marketing manager. Maybe you need to get yourself an admin, you know, an admin person, someone that's actually going to help you to address all the things that are growing the business. What you can't do is both. You can't wear both hats. It has an absolute ceiling on it. If you try and be the technician and the entrepreneur, you are going to fall apart at some stage.
So the four step process pretty much remains the same. It's just a question of if we break it up into a 70 30 or an 80 20. It's a question of where you want to spend that 20%. Is it in the trenches or out of the trenches. If it's in the trenches, find someone to fill in the other 80%. If it's out of the trenches, find someone to fill in the other 80%. But now they're not 80% in the trenches. They're now 80% working on the growing of the business.
The real danger, and I said at the very outset of this podcast that we talk about, the one thing that holds people back, the real danger, is the level of comfort. So what we find is that people often, and this is true, can I say, particularly of tradespeople and professionals, the one thing we find most commonly is that they love what they do so much that they stay in the trenches. In fact, it's not so much because they love it so much, but because it's comfortable. And so this comfort level is what we see as being probably the biggest thing that holds people back. When we first talk to a client about joining our mastermind program, and I'll often say to them, you know, where do you want to be? How do you want to get there? What's the one thing that's going to hold you back? And almost to a person they'll say, oh, it's probably me. It's probably me. And usually they're right, because we are often what holds ourselves back. But what you've got to think about is what is the emotion behind what's holding you back? Is it fear. Are you afraid of failure? Are you afraid of success?
And in my experience, the most common emotion that holds people back is comfort. Do you know what this is? Comfortable. There's a risk associated with taking that next step. There's a risk associated with doing things differently. It's kind of comfortable the way it is. And so we want to think about how do we remove ourselves from that comfort level? How do we push ourselves? And the trick to that, I believe, is to look at it and go, okay, if we're going to move out of that, of that comfort level, we've got to go out now and go, what is the reward? What's the reward for us to do that? We're now pushing ourselves outside of a comfort level? What's the reward as a destination goal? In other words, what we're hoping to achieve? And then what are the rewards for the various journey goals along the way? And all I mean by that is, if you go, I'm going to step myself out of out of the trenches. I'm going to work on the business. I'm going to double the business revenue in the next three years. That's your destination goal. What's the journey goal look like along the way? So, in other words, if you're on track in six months time, twelve months time, two years time, two and a half years time, etcetera, and set yourself up some really simple journey goals along the way.
Chatting with a mastermind client just yesterday, and we were talking about how, as a leader in their business, they wanted to make sure that they got the best out of their people, and they wanted to be the best leader they possibly could be. It was great. They said, oh, look, I went to this leadership seminar, and they said that what you have to do is you have to go to your people and ask them the question, what do you want from me? In order to be the best leader I can be?
And I said to them, that's really great advice, but there's just a slight variation to that. And the variation is this, before you ask them what they want from you to get to where they're going, you gotta know where they're going, right? So you've actually got to ask them a question about where do they want to be? And it's a very simple analogy I used, and I've used these car analogies a lot, but a very simple analogy is this, if you jumped into an Uber or a taxi, and the taxi driver said, right, if the first thing the taxi driver said was, look, what music would you like? Me to play on this journey? And what temperature would, like, the air conditioning set and what route would you like me to take? Well, hang on. Where are we going first?
And so before you go asking your team, guys, what do you need from me in order to be the best leader you need me to be? There's a step before that, which is, where do you want to go? Where do you see yourself in twelve months time? Where do you see yourself in six months time? Or two years time or whatever it might be? I love the twelve month question, right? If we're having this conversation in twelve months time, and it's, you know, whatever it is, 2025, what's happening? What's happened for you? You've achieved everything you wanted to achieve in your job. Tell me what's going on. So I love that question, because once you get a clear picture of that, then you can move into the leadership question, which is then a question of, okay, well, what do you think you need from me? If I'm going to help you to get there as your leader, what do you think you need from me? And I think it's really important that we put it in the right sequence.
So one of the things we started this podcast episode talking about, what's the thing, the big thing that holds everybody back from scaling their business? And I believe it's comfort.
Comfort because they won't get out of the trenches. Comfort because they won't stop doing certain things. Comfort because they won't change the way they view the world. Comfort because they won't expand themselves or take risks.
What's the one thing that holds you back from getting the best out of your team is not understanding where they want to go, not understanding the journey that they have in mind and the destination they have mapped out for themselves. So as soon as you understand that, it's very easy to go back then and start asking questions of, all right, well, if that's where you want to be, then how can I help you get there? Let's do a quick recap of this episode. We spoke about how to get out of the trenches and how there's a four step process. The idea is to understand. Ask yourself the question. Number one, do you actually want to. Number two, how much time do I want to do I want to spend in the trenches? And it could be 20%. It could be zero. Step number three, if I'm going to get out, who's going to get in? And step number four, if I choose to actually stay in, then who's going to do that? Additional work for me. Who's going to do the work that is working on the business? How do I scale it? Because we, as we discussed, you can't stay in the trenches and 100% and expect your business to actually scale.
Then number two, we spoke about what's the biggest thing that I see holding small business owners and professionals back. And it is feeling a level of comfort. It's not fear. It's really interesting. When I ask that question, most people sort of go, it's probably fear. Fear of failure, fear of success. It isn't fear. It is actually being comfortable. And then finally we spoke about what's the big thing that holds you back as a leader from getting the very best out of your team.
You can't employ a strategy to be a great leader if you don't know what their state of mind and story is first. So the first thing you have to ask your team is, guys, what do you want out of this? What do you want? Where do you want to be? Once you understand that it's super simple, then go, okay, bang, that's where you want to be. What do I need to do to help you get there? These are the sort of things that we teach our mastermind clients all the time. If you are in small business or a professional practice and you like to learn how to build a business and not just a job, Metropolemastermind.com dot au comma we'd love to have a chat to you about how we can help you. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast, please share it. If you didn't enjoy it, share it anyway. Why should you be the only one who suffers? And if of course, we love you to like it and subscribe it, it makes us subscribe to it, I should say makes it so much easier for other people to find it. This is Mark Creedon signing off from the Mastermind for Business podcast. We're going to see you in the next episode, but between now and then, please make sure you spend some time with those who matter most to you.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: Thanks for joining us on the mastermind for business podcast. If you're ready to have a business that you're not a slave to, check out metropolemastermind.com dot Au or have a chat with Mark and the team at all the w's see whatspossible dot today.
