How to Build a Business, Not a Job – in Just 7 Minutes with David Finkel

Related Links and Resources:

I've arranged my staff to give them a full month of free coaching. This is straight-up coaching; two one-to-one sessions, several small group sessions. Access to several of our best tools and they can get that at www.mauimastermind.com/freemonth

Summary:

David Finkel is the Wall Street Journal and Business Week best-selling author of 12 business books. David wrote his current bestseller, The Freedom Formula: How to Succeed in Business Without Sacrificing Your Family, Health, or Life. He co-authored, SCALE, with Jeff Hoffman, co-founder of Priceline.com.

David is the CEO of Maui Mastermind®, North America’s premier business coaching company which helps business owners grow their companies and get their lives back. Over the past 20 years, David and the other Maui coaches and advisors have personally scaled companies with an aggregate value of $63 billion.

His syndicated column on Inc.com and Forbes.com garner million readers every year.  His work has been featured in such prestigious media outlets as the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Businessweek, Fox Business, MSNBC, and Inc. Magazine.

Here are the highlights of this episode:

2:46 David’s ideal Client: Three levels of building a business; level 1 start-up, level 2 owner relying company, and level 3 is an owner independent company. We tend to work with people in that      Owner reliance stage. They started to build a business but it's totally circumscribed by them. Generally, sales of maybe half a million to 20 million dollars a year. They want to grow but more importantly than just growth or at least equal importantly, they want their lives back.

3:23 Problem David helps solve: I'm going to give you two. First one I called it 'self-employment trap', they build this business but it all revolves around them, all roads lead back to them. They don't have a business; they have a self-employment job. The second one is that they start to break part of that but they are still relying on what I called 'hit-by-a-bus' test. If something happens to them or if one key person in their company, they are in a world of hurt within 30 to 60 days. Their business is out of business. That's generally the biggest problem that we solve.

4:09 Typical symptoms that clients do before reaching out to David: It boils down to two things; stress and overwhelm. They have businesses that work, it's profitable, they've been doing this for a while, but everything falls back to them. Before we start working with a client, before we work with them, 60 to 80 hours or more per week is a very typical work week. Generally, if they take any vacation before we work with them, it's not really a vacation. They still check in everyday with email, text, and other app feeds. And so, the questions now become "how can they actually have a business that doesn't own them but they own their business?" that's generally what it is that they’re feeling. They're feeling out of control with this part, they feel like their business literally has this 'hooks' into them. They're appreciative that it supported them as well as it has but there's this low level that if something happens to them, their businesses is gone. And they're really feeling overwhelmed and tired before we even start working with them.

5:19 What are some of the common mistakes that folks make before finding David and his solution:  I got two quick ones; they biggest one is that they're trying to 'brute force' their solution, "oh if I need to grow, I'm going to grow by working harder, longer work nights, on the weekends, I'll bring a little bit of work on my vacation because no one's calling me, I can get the real work done.." and the problem is, there's always this level that the ceiling of success with that. You can grow, but you're not going to grow very much. There's going to be this point where you can't work any more hours or there's a degrading relationship for every extra hour work, you get less than one hour value back out. So, the solution can't be 'brute force.' It's not about more, it's about better. Focusing on fewer things that matter a whole bunch more. The second I called the 'knight and shining armor' they think "oh, I'll just hire someone to do this for me" and I will tell you, I've been coaching people for 24 years, that is 99% of the time leads directly to failure. Yes, it might work for the short run but usually what happens is, there's something that's going to happen in that relationship. All you've done is transfer the reliance from your shoulder to somebody else's and now you are beholding or held hostage by this other person and that is not the way to solve the owner reliance trap.

6:44 David’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): We'll call it the 'time value matrix'. Everyone's heard of the 'Pareto's principle: the 80-20 rule'. So, if 80% of what I do gives me very low value and 20% return, we call that 'D-time'. And 20% is leverage 'C-time' gets me 80% of the return, but most people stop there. Let's apply that twice more. If 20% gives me 80%, then 20% of the 20% is sweet spot 'B-time', gives me 80% of the 80%. That's 64% of my output. And I'll do it one more time briefly here: 20% of the 20% of the 20% gives me 80% of the 80% of the 80%. Here's how it works out mathematically. Roughly this magic 1% gives me half of the result, and here's the key distinction with that. I need to make sure that I have blocks of my week back, an hour to two hours at least once or twice a week at a minimum as a recurring schedule time to focus on one or two exclusively A or B level activities. If I do that, the difference is most business owners who are trapped in this self-employment think it's about me working more to produce my product or sell my product. Well, that may or may not be, that's likely to be C-time for them. If I can step back, my choice of who I'm marketing to, my choice of how can I trains somebody else or improve my system for fulfilling my service offering, that generally will be the A or B activities for that person who's trying to get out of that self-employment trap.

8:27 David’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Bill, just for your listeners, I've arranged my staff to give them a full month of free coaching. This is straight-up coaching; two one-to-one sessions, several small group sessions. Access to several of our best tools and they can get that at mauimastermind.com/freemonth.

9:04 Everyone knows that want to build a business and not a job, so what's the single biggest thing that stops them? I'm going to tell you that it's a medical condition, it's called 'controlitis',  it's the inflammation of your control gland. It's the business owners that are so uncomfortable with letting go. The way they deal with is that they let go of everything all at once or they hold on tightly. Neither is the right approach. Instead we want to slowly, incrementally, and intelligently let go of systems, teams that’re well-trained while building a culture of having team that’re well-trained with good systems in place. Controlitis by far is the number one constraint to people growing beyond just themselves.