Episode 435: Thinking Time - Think Like an Architect

When we think about our business, we think of it like an architect. We're designing it with these restrictions and understanding the realistic things that we have to be able to deal with. How fast can we grow the company? What is the profit that we're able to begin to balance? But also, there's somewhat of a timeline. I've talked about this many times, but I believe when you think about what is your business blueprint, it is 3 things. It is your 3-year vision. It is when your 1-year objectives, and then it is your 90-day targets. Your 3-1-90.

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Hey everyone. Well, if you have kids or even if you don't have kids, maybe have grandkids, you know that YouTube is all the rage. My kids are 14 and 10 and they have so many different creators that they love. And truthfully, it's one of my favorite platforms. It actually probably is my favorite platform. I have Auburn football creators that I love to be able to follow, some business creators that I love to be able to follow. I know many of you out there may follow someone like an Alex from Ozzie on YouTube, etc. And I even have some travel people that I love to be able to follow. Kara and Nate are fantastic people to be able to follow on YouTube. Well, with our kids, they love a creator named Mark Rober. And if you know Mark, he's an engineer, used to work at NASA, and now became a creator. And I think he only drops one YouTube video per month, and of course it gets tens of millions of views. And don't know exactly how many subscribers he has, but I think it's now north of 50 million subscribers. So certainly one of the top 25, maybe 50 YouTube creators in the world. Well, one of the products that he has that he's now been able to monetize his YouTube channel, not just from obviously the videos on YouTube, but now actually having some products, is with his Crunch Labs subscription box. And there's a lot of breakdown that you could do around how he's been able to monetize that by having a subscription, sending out— I think you get 4 boxes a year started with kids and now he even has gone more upstream, or I guess adjacent, into another group of people with more complex boxes that even adults can get into. The reason I'm sending this and talking about Mark is because of what's on the side of his boxes, and it says, "Think like an engineer." And I love that because I believe as business owners, We need to think like an architect. What do architects use? They use blueprints. Just like a blueprint is invaluable to an architect, I believe that if we begin to think like an architect in our business, we begin to design things as opposed to allowing them to default, we can be able to go further, faster in our business. Here's the deal. If we think about what does an architect do, they are going to ultimately take the vision that you have. What are some of the things that you're wanting to put into your house? Let's say it's a house. It obviously could be a commercial building, etc., but let's just go with the residential house. Let's say that you wanted to put in a golf simulator and then you wanted to build the house around that. Obviously, that would certainly be my dream, but what if you wanted to you really had a vision in your mind of what you wanted your kitchen to be. Or maybe it's around where your kids are, where you are with your family. Now maybe you're empty nesters and you're wanting to begin to downsize, or maybe you're wanting to design that beautiful lake house or beach house that you've always wanted. You go into it with some level of idea of what it is that you want, and then that architect is going to take those ideas and begin to put it together, but they're also realizing that there's probably number one, some budget constraints. Vast majority of people, there are certainly budget constraints. Are we gonna be $300,000? Are we gonna do half a million? Is this a, a million dollar or multi-million dollar project? Second constraint is also the land. How big is your lot? Are we talking about we have acres upon acres to be able to deal with here, or are we talking about we We've got a fourth of an acre of land inside of a smaller neighborhood that we're having to put the constraints in. And I think the similarity there is with our businesses. We really have unlimited options, but we bump those unlimited options of things that we could do in our business against limited resources. We only have so much of our time. We only have so many financial resources that we can throw at a problem. We only have capacity within our teams. See, the world that I know and operate and work with people is in businesses doing, say, $300,000 up to $3 million in revenue. And so you're typically looking at team sizes of 1 or 2 team members all the way up to maybe 20 or 30 team members in size. And sure, can you go beyond that and Maybe some of you listening to this have been able to go past that level in your business and maybe even have desires to want to go past that. But when you're somewhere in that 2 or 3 team members to 30 team members size, there's limited resources that you have. You can't just throw money at a problem like a bigger business often can. And certainly, we don't have the financial backing. And so when we think about our business, we think of it like an architect. We're, designing it with these restrictions and understanding the realistic things that we have to be able to deal with. Where, how fast can we grow the company? What is the profit that we're able to begin to balance? But also there's somewhat of a timeline. I've talked about this many times, but I believe when you think about what is your business blueprint, it is 3 things. It is your 3-year vision. It is when your 1-year objectives and then it is your 90-day targets, your 3-1-90. That's your business blueprint. That is what you ultimately want the house to begin to look like. Now, certainly, depending on how detailed those blueprints are, your builder, your contractor is able to take some of those blueprints and then go about building the house, but they don't start, they don't break ground is what they'll say. They don't break ground and begin to lay the cinder blocks. They don't begin to fill in with the gravel and begin to put the plumbing in, and they don't begin to do any of that until first that house is designed. When you think about that, are you potentially maybe just running enthusiastically working really, really hard. This is almost never an issue for small business owners about whether or not they're working hard enough. This is the one area certainly that I believe Hormozi maybe tends to overstate what it takes to working hard, but he tends to talk about the need to increase volume. And I think for younger people, especially people wanting to get into business and get started, that certainly is the case, but By far, what I tend to see is more overworked business owners. That was certainly me, where I was working so hard that I was actually spinning my wheels. And when I go back and think about what were all the things that I was maybe doing wrong, well, one of them was I didn't have a blueprint I was operating off of. If you pressed me and I had some situations where I was in other entrepreneurial groups and they would ask some of the most basic questions. So what's the goal? And I would give some half-hearted answer. I remember one person at a CEO roundtable meeting where I live, the person said, came back and asked me the exact same question, and I had talked for 5 minutes, and they said, so I'm going to ask it again, what is your goal? What are you building towards? And I really didn't have a good answer. I think I tried again and he ultimately kind of let me slide. But now, if you ask me that question, you could be able to say, what is it you're trying to do over the next 3 years with this business? Where are you trying to go with this business over the next 3 years? What are you trying to do in 2025? And that's the first step. So it's really about taking the time to develop your 3-year vision, and then secondly, communicating that down to your team. At that point, you begin to get buy-in, and you can start to, quote unquote, break ground in your business. You start to actually— the effort that you're putting forth is now there's an end vision in mind. Now, does the journey stop there? Almost never. It does. The journey continues on. That's the beautiful thing about entrepreneurship. But at least we have a vision of what it is that we're working towards. And when we get there 3 years down the road, we'll look back and we'll see, hey, how did we do with that? That's— this is what we said we wanted to do. How did we do? And it becomes almost an artifact of nature that you're able to look back on and see, wow, what was my thinking back then? Now, this is not always the case, but I'm going to say the majority of the time when people have gone through even sometimes the uncomfortableness of creating their first 3-year vision. For many of you listening to this, you're probably accustomed to doing the 1-year sprint. You're accustomed to doing, setting 1-year goals for 2025. That's not uncommon. I mean, you're in business your first year, you're setting your first, your 1-year goals. But expanding that out to 3 years and then even breaking it down into that 90-day and then the combination of those 3, I think is what is really unique. The closer you get, the more detailed your plans, your actual actions need to be, and the easier it is to see. If you started to plan out in January of this quarter and started to look at what do we want to do by the end of March, it's a lot easier to look at that as opposed to what are we trying to do over the next 3 years? And it's difficult to be able to look, but there's still so much value in looking at What do we want this business to look like 3 years from now? And then let's go about building that. So my hope is that today, instead of thinking like an engineer, like a Mark Rober, begin to think like an architect. Begin to design your business for what it is that you want it to be, not just default. All right, everyone, hope this helped you to make the move from being the rainmaker of your business to becoming the architect of your business. Hey, on my website, I've got a number of free assets that you can go and check out. If you just go to blueprintos.com/assets, we've got some free tools on there. You can obviously check out some of my web classes, etc. So just go and check out blueprintos.com/assets. All right, everyone, till next episode, lead well and go be great.

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