Episode 313: The Obstacle Is The Way

What if you could step out of the day-to-day and see your business from a whole new perspective? Welcome to Above the Business, where we empower you to rise above the daily grind and embrace a higher way of business ownership. It's time to build your business by design. Hey everyone, so when this episode drops, we will have just spent a couple days with the 2024 annual business planning process. And the week prior to this, and then the week, uh, this week itself, I was working on myself, but then also with several clients one-on-one with what their 2024 plan is going to look like. And I wanted to share this one thing that I made sure that we talked about, which was a big part of the annual planning process and the annual planning workshop that we just completed. And hopefully this also serves you. And I shared a little bit about this when I— if you if you go to last week's episode, but I'm going to go deeper into, uh, this one topic. I have not— I had not until the last few months read kind of the cult classic book The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday. Yeah, I've had the book for some time, and I finally said, you know what, I'm going to read this book. And, and if you've listened to the podcast for a period of time, You know that I've shared that this year in particular, it started really last year, but this year in particular, I was a little bit more, actually a lot more intentional about the books that I read. But this is the one that I did finally decide this is the one that I'm going to read because I started to kind of think through this idea of obstacles. And I want to read to you this one short part that's really in the preface section. And it says he then concluded with these powerful words destined for Maxim: the impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way. And if you think about your own journey, every single one of you listening to this would be able to, if somebody asks you a question, to share point A What is current reality of your business? What is good? What is not good? How many customers do you serve? How many team members do you have? What's your revenue? What was your profit in 2023? What's your culture like? What's your marketing systems like? What's your sales playbook look like? What are the plays that you're running in your business? So on and so on and so on and so forth. What does your personal week look like? How is your energy rhythms? I mean, I could keep going. And doing all of that would share with you your current reality or what we would call Point A. And if you lean out, regardless of whatever goal-setting framework that you use, you have something that you've set out that says, this is my future desired reality of where we want to be in December of 2024. And so the whole point of this episode is not point A and not point B, but it is about figuring out what is the obstacle that's standing in the way of you and your business of achieving that.

Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep. Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better-informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm.

Ambition is the first step towards success. It's time to level up your agency, and Coach P Consulting will help you do just that by using the same strategies he used to sell over 700 life insurance policies in 2021 alone. Now, this is not your regular one-and-done type coaching. You'll get personalized coaching 2 days a week, every week of the month, and you'll get a live look behind the scenes of his team training and an office that's performing at the highest level. There's a reason Coach P Consulting is the fastest growing coaching company for insurance agency owners in the country. Coach P will train your team alongside his own and show you the exact steps they are taking to achieve Chairman's Circle, Exotic Travel, and Multi-Line Presidents Club and be one of the few agents to be selected to have a third office. So whether your goal is to be at the top of your local market or amongst the best in the country, this training will give you the strategies and the tactics to get there. For just $250 a month, you'll get high-level coaching each week from someone who is already getting it done at that level. And his strategies work, and it's time to put them to work for you. Sign up at coachpeteconsulting.com and get your first full month for free when you mention the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.

And I believe that our ability to accurately identify what is actually standing in the way of our forward progress— look, if you're listening to this, in some way, shape, form, or fashion, you want to grow in 2024. I mean, look, if you don't want to grow, then just don't set any goals and just go through the motions and it doesn't really matter and you'll end up somewhere. But for pretty much all of you, you want to have some forward progress, whether it is customer growth, overall size of your business, the number of team members that you have, revenue growth, profitability growth. Maybe you just want to have some growth, but you don't want to work as much in the day-to-day operations of the business. That's what a lot of people that I work with. That's where they are. They want to be able to build and install an operating system so that their, the business is less and less dependent upon them. But even that is still some form of growth. And so the ability to think through what is actually, what is really the thing that's standing in my way. And so we went through this just briefly. We're actually doing a much deeper dive into our 2024 plan and planning process with my team a week from the time I'm shooting this. And, but we teed it up a little bit today. And I started to share with the team the difference between what is true and the truth. Between what is true and the truth. Meaning, so I asked them to share, what do you all think is the obstacle that's standing in our way of forward progress? And every one of them shared some things that I said, yeah, that's true. That's true. That's true. That's true. All of those are true, but what's the truth? What is the real thing? And so ultimately I shared with him what I felt like that was for us and what our truth is. Um, you know, you always need in, in both personal life and then in business, need people that are truth tellers. And being that for ourselves is not easy. It is not easy to objectively look at your own situation and say, maybe I'm the problem. Maybe we don't have a really good sale. We don't have a sales playbook at all. We don't have any documented systems. We don't have, you know, a marketing flywheel. We don't really know how we get leads. We don't really have— our culture is not really where it needs to be. I mean, at the end of the day, I could throw out a lot of things that could point to ultimately what is the obstacle standing in the way for you. But the journey that you can go through to kind of figure out what is actually the thing that I need to work on and then put everything towards that, everything, all of the effort and resources to knocking that down. Because the obstacle is the way, the way through it, the way towards where you are wanting to grow from point A, where you are today, to point B. There's something that's standing in the way of that forward progress, and your ability to accurately identify that and work on the problem that is, as Keith Cunningham says, versus the problem that isn't, the obstacle that is versus the obstacle isn't, is where all the forward progress in your business will be. And that's what I was working on for us, but I was also working on, uh, for other clients, is to ask them, what do you think standing in the way? And we went through that exercise of where are they today, and we went in great detail about where they are today. And then point B, where they want to be, in great detail, specifically where they want to be. And then we started the discussion of What do you think's standing in the way? And the answers that came out of that were pretty profound. A lot of people said, I really don't know. I don't know what that is. And that's a fair answer, but then them taking the thinking time to actually go through the process in the journey of trying to figure out what is the thing that actually is impending our forward progress. I hope this served you today. I hope 2023 was a fantastic year. I hope you're building upon that momentum going into 2024. Hey, if you want to check out some of the future events that we have going on, uh, in 2024, go to abovethebusiness.co and you'll be able to register your interest and kind of see some of the things that we've got going on and get on our, on our email list, and we'll be keeping you informed of some of the events that we've got coming up next year. All right, everyone, until next episode, lead well.